Octopi, part of Navis and Cargotec Corporation, the provider of operational technologies and services that unlock greater performance and efficiency for leading organizations throughout the global shipping industry, announced today it has successfully gone live at Tropical Shipping’s St. Thomas site. Due to the successful implementation, Tropical Shipping is now evaluating options to implement Octopi's cloud-based TOS across their portfolio of terminals throughout the Caribbean.
Located in the Virgin Islands, Tropical St. Thomas enables direct access to ports in the US, Canada and the Virgin Islands and operates at 97,000 TEU annually. To combat operational challenges they were experiencing, Tropical St. Thomas implemented Octopi’s nimble TOS SaaS, to modernize its terminal and give its stakeholders visibility and access to real-time information across its operations, without having to make any additional investments in IT support. Due to restrictions in place from COVID-19, the go-live was successfully completed via remote assistance and because of Octopi’s cloud-based platform with built in KPI dashboard, the project team was able to get live updates and be trained quickly on the TOS, despite not being able to be present on-site.
“To give St. Thomas the tools it needed to modernize, we decided to invest in a TOS that would be flexible for a terminal of that size while still offering the functionality of an enterprise-level system for enhanced operations,” said Mark Chapman, Vice President of Business Operations at Tropical Shipping. “With the recent pandemic, there's no way we could have deployed a new TOS at this location without Octopi's user-friendly and convenient platform to guide and connect our employees at nearly every level. By upgrading our operating system we are now prepared for the future and the next wave of increased volume at our terminal.”
The implementation of Octopi at Tropical St. Thomas has positively impacted customer service and has made employees more efficient to better perform critical tasks. Gate and vessel operations are now more productive and the “equipment control” team has saved an average of 6-8 hours a week with Octopi due to less repetitive communication and data verification, in addition to the introduction of EDI.
“Visibility and access to on-site information and operations is crucial to streamlining workflow and increasing performance and accuracy at terminals. Tropical St. Thomas is a great example of putting Octopi’s system into action in a time when it is especially critical for transparency among teams,” said Martin Bardi, VP Global Sales, Octopi. “We are proud to offer our customers a solution that can be deployed from anywhere and immediately be implemented to help them navigate their business and provide full visibility to all stakeholders involved.”
