5 Ways Tideworks Lets You Standardize Terminal Operations Across Multiple Sites
Managing terminal networks, across multiple sites, without the proper tools and processes can feel like you’re always playing catch up. Managing disparate terminals is redundant, expensive, and time-consuming for IT staff.
Workflow standardization across terminals is a goal many have tried, but IT or other organizational hurdles may have prevented the successful implementation. It’s time to lean on your TOS provider to do the heavy lifting to ensure you can eliminate redundancies and work efficiently across sites.
The Perks of Standardizing Terminal Operations
What if your corporate IT, accounting, management teams could access crucial information about any of the terminals they manage, all in one place? It often makes sense for large terminals with multiple sites to standardize the KPIs, processes/procedures, and reporting across all locations to create efficiencies and speed up decision-making.
To start, it’s essential to understand your different terminals’ needs based on size, location, and other factors. Let’s say your terminals are most differentiated based on size or volume. It’s important to organize all sites into buckets of “large,” “medium,” or “small.” Wide-span crane terminals will often monitor different criteria and have slightly different processes than smaller terminals, so you should avoid blanket standardization across all sites in the network.
That said, standardizing based on a determining factor, such as terminal size, is a great way to streamline work while also allowing for processes to support different everyday needs in terms of payroll, scheduling, IT infrastructure, billing, and more.
5 Ways Tideworks Lets You Standardize Operations Across Multiple Sites
Now that we understand a little more about what it means to standardize operations, let’s take a look at the five ways Tideworks will help you standardize operations across multiple sites.
1. Tideworks was Created For Terminal Operators by Terminal Operators
Tideworks was born out of one of the world’s largest terminal operators in SSA Marine. As such, you won’t just get software solutions from us, but also our expertise in the industry.
Tideworks employs team members with extensive on-terminal experience in almost every department. This means we understand your needs because we have lived them! So when it comes to managing multiple sites, we understand that all of our products need the integration and intuitiveness to communicate with each other and other systems in your terminals.
The lives of large terminal network operators are complicated. Our solutions ensure you can streamline work and increase visibility across your network at the same time. Because we’ve been on your side of the fence, we know the challenges your technology providers should be there to solve.
2. Boots on the Ground Planning and Implementation Teams
At Tideworks, we pride ourselves on being the most hands-on TOS provider in the industry. Because every terminal is different, we ensure the solutions delivered and strategies devised line up with the terminal’s processes and unique challenges or issues commonly experienced.
That’s why Tideworks has a planning process for new customers where we dedicate ourselves to becoming a part of the team:
- Conference room pilot (CRP): We roll up our sleeves in this first deep dive with key stakeholders to analyze current processes and document potential weaknesses that must be addressed. For example, do you have a different billing dashboard for each terminal that you need to log in to one by one? Do you have to navigate through tabs upon tabs of reports to assess terminals’ moves-per-hour? The CRP is the first step towards developing a game plan for implementation.
- Comprehensive on-site visits: Our boots on the ground implementation team visits your sites to develop a better understanding of the way traffic moves in and around the terminals. For terminal networks with different sized terminals, it’s often important to conduct walkthroughs of each site (small, large, etc) to get a sense of their different challenges, processes, etc. We’ll develop a report of your current processes, your restrictions, and any processes you want to follow. From there, our team has a roadmap to get the most ROI out of your investment.
We know in our changing world that remote partnerships are quickly becoming more than a pure necessity, but a real preference. Tideworks has revamped our training and implementation options to accommodate remote training and go-lives.
3. Standardized Training
A primary goal of standardization is to reduce time-to-train new employees and the complexity of procedures. With standardization, your staff can become well-versed and capable of seamlessly plugging into important metrics at any terminal in your network.
Standardized training means your people understand their roles better, and new employees can get up to speed quickly.
Tideworks’ first priority is to “train the trainers.” We work with you to identify signature people who will receive in-depth product training to become subject matter experts and can step in to fill gaps in future training and troubleshoot as needed.
But where standardized training really comes into play is through the development of role-specific training plans. The Tideworks TOS allows staff to become experts in their roles faster. Tideworks develops video-based training so someone in charge of vessel planning, for example, receives only training specific to vessel planning job responsibilities. This workflow speeds the training process so your employees can spend more time on-terminal and less time in the “classroom.”
4. Blackfin Billing Engine
Blackfin is Tideworks’ cloud-capable, multi-tenant billing system that is separate from the Tideworks TOS. Through Blackfin, Tideworks can centralize the management of tariffs, rates, invoicing, and more for customers. In doing so, we expand billing capabilities from the terminal level to the corporate level, allowing your corporate teams to access billing information from any terminal in the network from central dashboards.
Moreover, contract-based integration is natively built with the service, which improves the integration and improves our ability to capture and report on data. Due to the database events being dispatched fundamentally as part of the architecture, the billing service is no longer dependent on one specific TOS. Any TOS can integrate with Tideworks Blackfin.
Whether Mainsail or a third party TOS, this is where Tideworks becomes truly adaptive. Tideworks develops unique and invaluable expertise applied to our domain and to our market at large, helping customers handle their billing needs efficiently while also allowing us to build economies of scale that lead to lower IT costs and expenses.
5. Tideworks Insight
Similar to how Blackfin allows billing teams to centralize their work, operators can assess the performance of distinct terminal locations through roll-ups in the TOS. This time-saving functionality means you don’t have to go through the monotonous steps of manually creating the same reports for each location.
Tideworks Insight, our data platform, pulls data from the TOS so that you can monitor KPIs in real-time across the network in the form of user-friendly dashboards. And if something goes wrong anywhere in the network, Tideworks Insight’s centralized data means you are the first to know.
The Industry Standard-ized
Standardizing operations across multiple sites is an efficient and streamlined way of operating terminals. Through standardization, terminals can scale faster and identify weak spots earlier.
With Tideworks’ TOS solutions, first-hand experience in the field, and premiere training formula, you will find the process of standardizing operations more manageable than ever. Tideworks’ Blackfin Billing Engine will help you gather, report, and capture data for all of your billing needs. And Tideworks Insight’s robust data reporting functionality will allow your corporate teams to maintain complete visibility of all operations.
Connect with Tideworks today to learn more about how we can help you standardize.
