Navis recently hosted a two-day employee hackathon designed to boost innovation, collaboration and productivity for the company and uncover breakthrough ideas that could transform the future of product development.
The terminal operating system (TOS) designer held the event across three offices where Navis and XVELA software engineers operate, including Oakland, Austin and Chennai, India.
‘Navis Hack’ inspired more than 150 Navis and XVELA engineers to team up and submit over 70 innovative ideas.
Overall themes for the various submissions focused on tackling challenges within the ocean shipping industry, improving existing Navis/XVELA products or proposing new ideas to push the company to the next level in product development.
The teams presented demos of their design prototypes or implemented solution hacks to colleagues and a panel of judges for consideration and awards.
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Raj Gupta, CTO and SVP Engineering at Navis, said: “Internal hackathons have led to breakthroughs and development of notable products at some of the top technology companies in the world including Facebook’s ‘Like’ button, Google’s Gmail and LinkedIn’s Year in Review.
“Our first Navis Hack event was designed as a creative outlet where members of our engineering teams had the opportunity to take on new roles, break out of their daily routines, explore new ideas and think big – fostering an environment of true innovation.
“We have some of the best minds in the maritime business and technology working here and their motivation and commitment to transforming efficiency and productivity for the industry really shone through during this event.”
Of the more than 70 submissions and presentations that took place over the course of the event, the following winners were selected:
- Best Innovation: “Navis Smart Advisor” – N4 system health metrics are pushed to cloud based microservices which use machine learning to provide recommendations to users via Amazon Alexa or Android mobile app.
- Customer Impact Award: “System Gurus” – An intelligent microservice that helps users determine N4 upgrade feasibility by showing users exactly what changed between two different versions of N4 including highlighting groovy extensions whose dependent N4 product APIs have changed.
- Customer Impact Award: “Navis Risers” – A performance improvement for handling bulk updates in XPS speeding up the process of changing the vessel visit state in N4, leading to faster vessel close times and higher XPS message throughput.
- Best Design (UI/UX Backend): “XV Geo Hack” – XV Geo Hack improves XVELA vessel route mapping to use ocean waypoints, improving the mobile user experience and providing realistic vessel route visualization.
- Audience Poll Award: “TieDot” – An easy to use natural language search engine in N4, which provides business intelligence insights from the TOS in various graphical formats.
View the Navis Hack Twitter timeline:
The NavisHack #hackathon has started in the Oakland & Austin offices, and it's underway in Chennai! Over 100 participants between Navis Engineering teams and @xvelaconnect Engineers. Let's do this! Stay tuned. #Innovate #Create #NavisHack pic.twitter.com/5HA3R6Xxgp
— Navis (@naviscargo) February 15, 2018
Day 2 of the NavisHack #hackathon is on! We're hard at work in Austin, Oakland, and Chennai. Winners to be announced later today! #Innovate #Develop #NavisHack pic.twitter.com/sRHIOhvD22
— Navis (@naviscargo) February 16, 2018
Follow us on Instagram at @navispeople to keep up with #NavisHack (and to see more pictures of Meena’s cat Shadow, the harshest critic on the Judges’ Panel). #hackathon pic.twitter.com/htJ8Vw3psb
— Navis (@naviscargo) February 16, 2018
The cat's out of the bag! The winners of Best Innovation at NavisHack are… Smart Integrators! Nice job everyone and thanks for a great #hackathon! #NavisHack pic.twitter.com/eSqYpqPFIP
— Navis (@naviscargo) February 17, 2018
