Navis Reveals SPARCS N4 2.5 at TOC Europe 2013

Navis, a part of Cargotec Corporation and the global technology standard for managing the movement of cargo through terminals, today announced at TOC Europe the latest release of its advanced terminal operating system (TOS), SPARCS N4 2.5. SPARCS N4 2.5 helps Navis customers to optimize critical terminal operations like never before, offering more extensibility, automated equipment functionality and improved ease of implementation. Enhancements to the TOS include improvements to the architecture and foundational updates to functionality for rail, yard and vessel operations along with changes to data accessibility for upcoming Business Intelligence and Analytics solutions around automated equipment productivity. Release 2.5 continues to enhance functionality that makes the TOS easier to use and helps customers increase efficiency with a platform that can grow to meet future operational needs.

“SPARCS N4 2.5 represents a combination of best-of-breed technologies along with innovative features and functionality that are essential to driving optimization in the new age of marine shipping,” said Frank Kooijman, Sr. VP of Engineering, Navis. “With this release, we are setting the stage in the TOS for the next generation of terminal operations while focusing on a sound infrastructure to offer customers more performance, reliability and testing options, to ensure critical success can be achieved as the demands on their business evolve. Our goal is to future proof our customers through strategic product evolution.”

Major enhancements to SPARCS N4 2.5 include:

·  Improved Automation Functionality: The latest Navis TOS offers advanced automated equipment management with ASC and quay crane functionality, resulting in greater efficiencies at the terminal.

·  Enhanced Rail Management: SPARCS N4 2.5 provides new rail planning features to support de-coupled chassis operations, rail Autostow improvements, as well as rail inspection and railcar service events, enabling terminals to make rail operations more efficient and profitable. Further work in this area is planned for SPARCS N4 2.6.

·  Changes in Architecture: In release 2.5, we streamlined the architecture, which results in easier deployments and greater performance. We have introduced a UI for Business Intelligence that can run on various mobile platforms. We continue to drive Java Message Service (JMS) as our core infrastructure for communication between SPARCS N4 and other systems.

·  Deployment Options: A new Linux installer and performance scalability testing options help to make deployment of SPARCS N4 2.5 in a Linux environment more robust and streamlined.

·  Greater Business Intelligence Analytics: SPARCS N4’s Business Intelligence Analytics tool now includes ASC and yard crane productivity metrics, providing terminals with more holistic information to make key business decisions.

·  Enhanced Extensibility: Most of the User Interface is now customizable. We allow for additional customer specific (programmable) logic for outbound EDI presentation agnostic dashboards, and custom gadgets all contribute to the extensibility of the SPARCS N4 platform.