The Georgia Ports Authority and Kaleris today announced that their collaboration launching the Navis N4 terminal operating system at the Port of Savannah earned a 2023 Top Supply Chain Projects Award from Supply and Demand Chain Executive. The Top Supply Chain Projects Award profiles the most innovative projects that optimize and improve the supply chain for all stakeholders.

“As the nation’s third-busiest gateway for containerized trade, millions of people, businesses, and organizations rely on our essential services,” said Bill Sutton, Chief Information Officer at Georgia Ports Authority. “With more carriers and shippers selecting the Port of Savannah as their preferred East Coast gateway, we continued to experience record volumes and decided to expedite an infrastructure project to add 1.7 million TEUs of annual container yard capacity. A major crux of the project involved ensuring the right technology was in place to optimize infrastructure performance and accelerate the movement of cargo while minimizing disruption to our customers.”

After extensive research, the GPA selected the Navis N4 terminal operating system (TOS) from Kaleris. A state-of-the-art TOS, N4 optimizes operations for high-volume container terminals through intelligent planning and movement of goods, visibility and asset utilization. The system improves velocity across the terminal, eliminates data silos and enables the GPA to easily provide its customers, which includes all major shipping lines, retailers, vessel operators, rail and trucking companies, with the data and insights they need. N4 processes more than 40 percent of the global container volume annually at ports around the world.

While the N4 implementation project had an overall objective of driving more efficient operations to enable growth, the cutover from the legacy terminal operating system to N4 remained a crucial and highly challenging element within the project. Solved through careful planning and closely working together, the GPA and Kaleris minimized disruption to the port’s customers and restored efficient operations at the main container terminal within eight hours of the cutover. By industry standards, stabilization usually takes several weeks or longer for a facility of this size and volume.

“Launching a new foundational technology solution at a port is equivalent to performing a heart transplant on a marathon runner – during the marathon,” said Kirk Knauff, CEO of Kaleris. “Even in the most opportune of times, a terminal operating system migration at a brownfield mega terminal is a massive undertaking. A small disruption can have disastrous consequences downstream in the supply chain for the millions of stakeholders who depend on the port. We worked with the GPA to meticulously plan every detail of the implementation, and within three days the terminal achieved both benchmark vessel productivity and gate throughput.”

Effective collaboration played a major role in the successful launch of this new core technology solution at the Port of Savannah, even amid a perfect storm of the most challenging circumstances the industry ever faced – a pandemic, a global supply chain crisis, and surging import volumes across North America.

“From demand planning and forecasting to implementing the ultimate in warehouse automation, the past 12 months have seen companies within the supply chain and logistics space upgrade, enhance, adopt, and adapt in order to achieve greater efficiency along the chain,” says Marina Mayer, Editor-in-Chief of Supply & Demand Chain Executive and Food Logistics. “That’s why it’s important today’s supply chains run on collaboration.”

For more information on this Top Supply Chain Projects win, go to https://sdce.me/av7r0h.