Port of Hanko selected Frends to ensure a 24/7 situational awareness snapshot of the port. In addition, Port of Hanko uses Frends for Managed File Transfer and APIs that provide logistic companies information when their cargo arrives and leaves the port.
Business Goals
For a bustling commercial port, situational awareness of vessel traffic is crucial. Situational awareness plays one of the most crucial roles to port to be efficient in environmental issues and business alike. The understanding of what vessels are arriving and leaving the dock and when ensures that a berth is available precisely when the ship comes.
In the past, Port of Hanko kept the data up to date in an IT system manually. Even though the system visualizes the overall picture to the port community and staff, the data was constantly late as manually updated data often is. The information being late in a situational awareness system leads to noticing problems too late. For example, if the berth is unavailable as the ship arrives, it has to wait and consume fuel, thus being bad for the environment and business. The goal was to ensure that data, and situational awareness, consequently, are up-to-date without any time-consuming manual work.
"Frends is easy to learn, and we are able to build integration processes ourselves as well. So far, there has not been a use case that Frends could not have handled."
Timo Sjösten, Senior Manager – Port operations, IT, Safety & Security
Integration Challenges
Port of Hanko uses an online resource planning software called Ganttic for situational awareness. They have harnessed this visualization tool for port use, and users are happy with its ability to visualize all the incoming and outgoing traffic of the port. However, while the tool – Ganttic – is great for this use, it needs the data. The situational awareness must be up-to-date 24/7. Many factors can cause delays and changes in plans. The ship itself can have technical problems, and delays may occur on the shoreside, and weather conditions may slow the vessel down. Port of Hanko did not want to introduce any new systems and user interfaces for users. They wanted to enhance the existing and well-performing visualization product with the data available 24/7 automatically on every day of the year.
Results
With Frends, Port of Hanko integrated all of the data sources into the situational awareness system Ganttic, and automated data gathering processes. As a result, not only the existing data sources were automated, but Port of Hanko was able to use a whole new set of data sources available and introduce new interfaces, including machine-learned algorithms, to forecast ship arrivals.
"Central view is crucial for all data gathering processes, APIs, and file transfers. With the visual approach of Frends, we can easily understand how the processes work, especially how each instance has been executed and with what data. Frends is easy to learn, and we are able to build integration processes ourselves as well. So far, there has not been a use case that Frends could not have handled." -Timo Sjösten, Senior Manager – Port operations, IT, Safety & Security.
In the user questionnaire, conducted three months after the data automation process with Frends was deployed, 73% of the users said that the new up-to-date information was "Exceptionally important" and 27% said it is "Important". The new machine learning-based forecast of ship arrival is one of the most beneficial features of the new system.
"Combining the Ganttic out-of-the-shelf SaaS with an integration solution that allows proper integration to all the data sources gives us better situational awareness than many other commercial products tailored for this purpose alone could provide." - Timo Sjösten, Senior Manager – Port operations, IT, Safety & Security.