With successful implementation of APM Terminals’ standard Terminal Operating System (TOS) Navis N4, APM Terminals Mumbai joins the league of other terminals as part of its global rollout. 

Navis N4 is the leading and most widely used terminal operating system globally and has been selected as the global standard for APM Terminals. Its implementation at the APM Terminals Mumbai, also known as Gateway Terminals India (GTI), has been carried out with the support of the company’s global in-house implementation team and with minimal impact on customer operations.

“Adopting a standardised TOS globally brings numerous long-term advantages,” says Patrick Heilig, responsible for the global TOS implementation team. “It enables the sharing of best practises for improved efficiency; the development of in-house expertise that understands our customers and our business; centralised monitoring and support; and faster, cost-effective global development of front-end applications for customers.”

Having its own in-house TOS implementation team is unique in the industry, allowing learnings from each implementation to be passed onto the next. With the global TOS team located around the world in different time zones, it is also able to offer support 24 hours per day.

Better visibility and data exchange

The implementation of Navis N4 also opens the doors to a host of improved customer interfaces that will be rolled out on www.apmterminals.com/mumbai. These include Track & Trace, with the potential for customers to save containers and set email alerts for containers. It also makes live Truck Turn Times available on the website, to assist customers with planning container pick-ups and drop-offs. APM Terminals Mumbai will now also be able to share its terminals data at container level, via the company’s API products – which provide live information feeds to customers who, for example, operate a transport management system.

Girish Aggarwal, COO APM Terminals Mumbai added: “We are constantly striving towards improving our customer’s experience as they engage with the terminal and we see N4 as an effective tool to enable a host of features. This should help us provide significant enhancements in the interactive tools for the customers while helping us drive efficiencies”.

Advanced global monitoring

The TOS will now be part of an advanced, global application monitoring solution which is being rolled out across all of the company’s terminals. It is capable of spotting issues with performance before they start to negatively impact operations. This ensures business continuity, improves terminal efficiency, and safeguards consistency (peak moves per hour) by ensuring that applications consistently operate at the speed they’re supposed to. It will also prevent minor problems from combining to cause a major outage.

Instead of simply monitoring isolated points, the solution monitors end-to-end performance – including code, application architecture, servers, disk space, databases, user endpoints and more. The data is fed into one central dashboard, which is monitored 24/7 by the Maersk global Command & Control Centre in the UK and the GC3 support team.

“The dashboard operates using a simple traffic light system,” says David Pickup, APM Terminals Global Capability Manager. “Green means that no issues are detected. Amber flags have the potential to impact the business.  Our goal is to fix these before they turn to red flags. Red flags indicate that the issue is probably already impacting our operations. This new solution enables us to identify any issues before the end user even notices that something isn’t working as it should.”

Located in the Nhava Sheva’s Jawaharlal Nehru Port, just across the bay of Mumbai, APM Terminals Mumbai is India’s busiest container terminal handling facility, handling a more than 2 million TEUs annually in 2018 and 2019.