Comprehensive Inventory Control in Mainsail 10

Comprehensive Inventory Control Benefits Your Bottom Line

Every marine terminal in the world has capacity constraints. Finding the balance between how much volume you can handle while also maintaining optimized turn-times and efficiency has been a central challenge for terminal operators for decades. Comprehensive inventory management is a critical part of a terminal operating system, a key function that drives almost every other aspect of your operations and helps you maintain a healthy bottom line.

Costs of Poor Inventory Control

Poor inventory can result in low productivity and time lost searching for containers when delivering to trucks or loading to vessel or rail. If a ‘misplaced’ container misses its vessel or train, it can jeopardize the terminal operator’s very reputation. Revenue leakage is another potential outcome of poor inventory control. For example, say you have a limit on the number of empties that steamship lines can store within your facility. If you lack accurate inventory information, it’s difficult to know when a certain line has exceeded its empty allotment, causing your terminal to eat the cost of storing their empties. Simply put, you need to have a good handle on your inventory, or you may face lost productivity, revenue leakage, or a tarnished service reputation.

Activating Inventory Control With Real-Time and Graphical Capabilities

Real-time access to operations data is the only way to understand your full inventory picture. Mainsail provides you with complete inventory management of containers, chassis, gensets, rolling stock, over-dimensional cargo, and hazardous materials. The application makes tracking easy through its design — customize screens and reports to meet the needs of your internal and external stakeholders. By providing accurate inventory data in real-time, you can stay on top of your operations, making the entire container lifecycle more efficient.

Tightly coupled with Mainsail, Spinnaker’s newly upgraded graphical interface gives you powerful data visualization and reporting tools that not only allow you to react to inventory issues in real-time but also strategically plan how your yard will be utilized and how vessels will be stowed or discharged. Active inventory control provides you with a perfect view of what cargo is on your terminal at any given time.

Working Towards a Common Goal

Mainsail 10 empowers terminal operators to make informed, data-driven decisions and allows you to access more features from a single workspace. You can easily filter and sort data, launch custom searches and share results. Both teams and individual users can customize their experience and quickly navigate through the system with fewer keystrokes to get the information they need to create on-demand reports. Mainsail 10 is built on a reliable, scalable development platform that integrates seamlessly with third-party systems, and the responsive design enables the application to be rendered on a variety of devices so you can access information on the go. Mainsail 10 gives you the oversight you need to optimize your terminal operations.

It Starts & Ends With Inventory

Excess inventory clogs up space in your yard and can hobble your operation resulting in profit loss and slowdowns across the board. For instance, are you storing excess empty containers on your terminal? If they’re not generating revenue, could you move them off the property and out to a storage facility? Knowing what kind of inventory you have, where it is located and the current use of containers in inventory helps to accelerate fulfillment, lower costs and avoid costly errors. Inventory management has a direct impact on the health of your bottom line. Mainsail provides inventory intelligence that keeps your terminal operating reliably and efficiently. Mainsail 10 brings control directly to your fingertips so, you hold the keys to productivity improvements and cost savings in your terminal.