Anyone that’s dealt with large volumes of information before has seen it. The neverending Excel spreadsheet filled with data. Column after column and row after row, numbers, and labels divided into identical little boxes, stretching off into infinity.

Or so it can feel when you’re tasked with turning all of that raw data into a meaningful report. At that moment you realize that there’s a disconnect between collecting data and using data. Collecting is easy. In today’s digital world, data can be culled from a superfluous number of sources. But the result is a massive, impenetrable data set that hides its insights in tiny, white boxes.

What’s needed is a tool that can sort through all of this data, and not just from one source, but from every source, allowing users to easily make meaningful connections between all of those boxes. This can make the difference between a report that just gets read and one that provokes useful action and helps an organization reach its goals.

Tideworks Insight is that tool. It connects all of your disparate systems and lets you analyze data from them, simultaneously. It helps your data provoke an emotional response from the end-user, and it does it in an automated, organized, and powerful way.

ERP vs Tideworks Insight: The Difference Between Collecting and Using Data

Many organizations utilize Enterprise Resource Planning software (ERP) to centralize their extended business functions, like inventory and order management, accounting, human resources, customer relationship management, and more. These tools allow data to flow seamlessly between each function, eliminating duplication and creating the start of a connected data collection.

However, for terminals and other businesses, this is only half of the picture. An ERP misses the operational side of the equation. This is critical data that, if it’s collected at all, lives in an entirely different realm, disconnected from the financial side of the business.

In essence, you have two separate spheres, both collecting data, with no way to bridge the two. Without a way to fuse those two halves together, you can’t meaningfully use the data you’re collecting.

An analogy for collecting vs using data might be someone that collects Lego bricks. If they amass them for collection purposes but never build anything with them, are they really getting value out of their investment? Collecting data is a fruitless effort if you never build anything useful with it.

Read our Manzanillo International Terminal (MIT) Case Study to explore how Tideworks implemented Insight at MIT to increase productivity and minimize downtime.

Tideworks Insight lets you integrate data from your ERP, your TOS, and many other systems to gain deep insights into both the financial and operational sides of your business. With Tideworks Insight, a CEO might view a dashboard that shows moves per hour for a given hour of a given time zone, of a given day around the world for a 24-hour period. They could look at a birds-eye view, or drill down to the terminal level. That’s simply not possible without a data analysis platform that lets you synchronize all of your data in real-time.

Integrate, Integrate, Integrate!

Tideworks Insight can integrate data from nearly any source, offering visibility into all your modern systems. The more information you feed it, the deeper the insights it can provide.

On top of your ERP and your TOS, you might integrate a separate tax system, purchase order system, or any number of other business data sources. Any tool that generates a database can be integrated into Tideworks Insight, its data aligned with data from every other source to create uniquely powerful ways of quantifying and analyzing the processes you need to measure.

You could use Tideworks Insight to align project numbers from every source into the same column, aggregating all the various pieces of data tied to those project numbers for a complete picture of each project. You could look at project, vessel, or job data from every possible angle simultaneously, whether you need cost information, performance information, or KPI measurements. All of these are instantly available from one central platform and all linked for easy analysis. This gives users the clearest picture of their terminal operations possible.

How Tideworks Insight Integrations Could Impact Overall Business Decisions

A few real-world examples will help illustrate Tideworks Insight’s benefits. You’re likely accumulating historical maintenance data on the cranes in your terminal. In a separate system, you have purchasing data about those cranes, for maintenance parts and repair costs.

When you bring the data from these two systems together you unlock potent new methods for viewing your equipment. Cross-referencing maintenance records with their associated costs it becomes clear whether a given crane is costing more to maintain than it would cost to purchase a new one, and whether those costs are occurring more frequently than they should.

Add data from your TOS, and you can pull insights from the crane’s operational, financial, and maintenance records to get a complete picture of your current investment and how it’s performing. 

With the integrations possible in Tideworks Insight, you might also examine the operational consequences of purchasing OEM vs non-OEM parts. Separately, your data is mute on the subject but integrated it becomes clear that the OEM parts are lasting longer and, relative to their higher prices, are still better values long term.

The Tideworks Insight Advantage

Tideworks Insight breaks data free from the siloed systems that collect it and liberates users from the complicated architectures that limit data access. Consider an accountant that knows nothing about how a TOS works or a maintenance worker that would be lost in front of accounting software. With Tideworks Insight, valuable connections can be made within all of these realms without needing to learn their architecture. All you need to know is Tideworks Insight.

Tideworks Insight evolves data collection to create total data cohesion — every piece of data your business collects, aggregated and cross-referenced, with powerful, customizable dashboards that help reveal the hidden efficiencies and optimizations that are currently scattered across multiple systems.

That’s the power of Tideworks Insight. You get a complete picture of every part of your organization, deeply connected and infinitely searchable. Every piece of data is viewable against every other piece of data. You’ll gain insights into the complexities of your terminal operations that simply weren’t achievable before, insights that will translate into real savings and powerful operational efficiencies. Tideworks Insight is the future of terminal data.