Terminal operations tend to be very reliant on lists: Lists of incoming inventory, equipment work orders, and planned container moves, just to name a few. But for operators trying to monitor and manage yard operations in real-time, large spreadsheets of integrated terminal data don’t offer a lot of value.
That’s where 3D visualization can completely transform how terminal operators use data to level up their decision-making. By turning static data and spreadsheets into visual, dynamic, 3D renderings of your physical terminal environment, 3D visualization creates an intuitive and interactive digital model of your terminal that looks a lot like the immersive world you might find in a video game.
With these detailed and accurate 3D renderings, operators can monitor terminal operations and even forecast activities into the future—all in a format that is far easier to understand than endless lists of numbers.
“It requires a high level of domain knowledge to be able to look at a list and visualize in your head where those activities are actually distributed around the yard,” says Julian Galvis, VP, Sales & Marketing at Tideworks. “It requires a lot of time for someone to become so adept at understanding their own yard that they can read those lists and visualize the yard on their own.”
As constrained terminals push to increase their throughput, effective yard planning and orchestration are critical to keep operations running smoothly. Once considered “nice to have” technology, 3D visualization tools like Tideworks’ Terminal View are increasingly essential to your terminal’s day-to-day activities.
Through improved planning outcomes and more options for optimizing operations, 3D visualization is driving real ROI for marine and intermodal terminals.
4 challenges brought on by a lack of terminal visualization
When terminals aren’t able to visually render data across their operations, they suffer from inefficiencies and oversights that lead to even greater downstream repercussions. Data visibility isn’t enough—you also need to translate that data into a visual, dynamic format that can spark quicker and better decision-making.
Here are four ways this lack of visualization can impact throughput and overall terminal profitability and performance:
1. Increasing yard volatility
Volume volatility is largely out of your terminal’s control. But as volumes increase, a lack of visibility into real-time yard capacity can lead to disruptive congestion and operational bottlenecks.
Without the right tools to monitor and manage this volatility, terminals will continue to face capacity and volume constraints, cost inefficiencies across their operations, and impacts to their customer service levels.
2. Yardspace constraints
Few terminals have the luxury of expanding their existing yard. When yardspace is fixed and available space is limited, efficient management is essential.
Terminals can optimize their operations within these finite constraints through real-time yard planning, lift orchestration, efficient asset utilization, and the ability to forecast bottlenecks. But all of these capabilities require comprehensive visibility across the yard.
3. Pressure to drive greater efficiency
Volatility can’t be fixed, and yardspace can’t be magically opened up, yet many terminals are pushed to do more with less – increase throughput and profit margins in spite of these fixed conditions.
Without visibility into operations, these efficiency goals can’t be met. Operations will feel increased pressure from terminal stakeholders, but they won’t have the tools or information they need to make those changes happen. Meanwhile, terminals that do prioritize operational visibility will open the door to better performance, revenue generation, and profitability.
4. In-yard collisions and safety hazards
Collisions between cranes and other terminal equipment can be severely disruptive to yard activities, halting activities and taking machinery out of operation. In worst-case scenarios, these collisions can also expose workers to injury. 3D visualization tools can use terminal data to forecast container moves, crane operations, and other yard activity to help operators anticipate and prevent these accidents from ever occurring.
“3D visualization can tell you, ‘Hey, in 20 minutes, these two yard cranes are going to be trying to access the same piece of real estate,” says Galvis. “That gives operators time to shift their plans.”
The real reason why your terminal will benefit from 3D visualization
3D visibility tools like Tideworks’ Terminal View offer solutions to all of the challenges listed above and can deliver value in unexpected ways.
As terminal operators put their visualization tools to work, it becomes easier to see and address potential issues before they occur. Equipment crashes and other on-the-ground disruptions can be avoided with more proactive yard planning, and new opportunities for optimization can be identified by members of your ops team.
When your ops team can run simulations and view real-time equipment positioning using various filters, like color-coding, they’re able to process information faster than when poring over spreadsheets and other incoming data.
Hazardous materials, for example, are color-coded by IMO code to help operators ensure proper handling for those containers. Yard planning teams can also assign colors to specific containers to set move priorities and ensure that cranes handle urgent moves first.
In that sense, the greatest long-term value of 3D visualization is its ability to provide a new perspective of terminal operations for on-the-ground experts. That perspective enables better decision-making by:
-
- Turning abstract data into instantly understood visual insights
- Reducing cognitive load for operators in high-pressure situations
- Shortening reaction times between identifying a problem and taking action
- Helping users instantly spot anomalies, bottlenecks, and unusual patterns
- Improving situational awareness for all users, all of the time
3D visualization brings clarity to complicated operational decisions. Every terminal, regardless of size or volume, can realize the benefits of this improved, visualized perspective to achieve three critical outcomes:
1. Full control over operations
3D visualization allows you to create a real-world scale model of your terminal and equipment, providing comprehensive visibility across all terminal operations. You can view container locations, moves, and other yard activity in real time. Individual equipment and container details—including container contents, destination info, move prioritization, and custom notes and color labels added by operations personnel—can be easily viewed to make sure those assets are being managed appropriately.
This visibility also allows terminal operators to forecast bottlenecks and collisions before they occur, which gives them a window of opportunity to take corrective action.
“When I’m inside Terminal View, for example, I can select moves where two pieces of equipment or two teams are trying to operate too closely—and I can put one of those on hold until the other team has finished,” says Galvis.
2. Optimized asset utilization and terminal productivity
3D visualization tools can use differential GPS (DGPS) and other positioning systems to enable real-time views of asset locations, including idle time alerts for all of your UTRs and CHEs. Meanwhile, operations leaders can configure idle time alerts that put equipment back into action once it passes its idle time threshold. By using these alerts to minimize equipment downtime, operators can improve equipment availability, utilization, and overall productivity across the terminal.
With 3D terminal simulations, operators can plan ahead by anticipating bottlenecks and increasing productivity through asset utilization and move prioritization. Historical operations data can also be used to refine tactics for managing volume volatility. Heat maps can inform how ops leaders allocate assets and take corrective actions—such as placing certain moves on hold—to alleviate yard congestion and provide more efficient service to customers.
3. Integration with providers
By integrating positional data from multiple providers, 3D visualization solutions like Tideworks’ Terminal View centralize all of your equipment and container data in one place, making it easier to view and contextualize this data when making yard management decisions.
For example, Terminal View could bring together crane position updates, individual equipment data, PDS inputs from Tideworks’ TANGO Trace and Go, and any other provider data your terminal needs to make your on-the-ground operations fully visible for your ops leaders.
Do you need a digital twin in your terminal?
When operations can be fully rendered through a 3D visualization solution, terminals can take their optimization efforts even further by creating a “digital twin” of their physical environment. A digital twin provides a digital model of the yard and its operations where ops leaders can perform simulations, testing, integrations, monitoring, and maintenance in a controlled virtual environment.
“A digital twin allows you to make changes and see how they impact your operations before those actions are executed in the actual yard,” says Galvis.
Galvis notes that while other existing digital modeling products are focused on simulating changes to the yard layout, Tideworks’ Terminal View is “more focused on real-time data and presenting that to the operations and control rooms—because those are the team members that really need to track and manage inventory flow around the terminal.”
The benefits of a digital twin can be enormous for operations leaders: Instead of trialing change in a live environment and risking costly disruptions, a digital twin provides a controlled environment where a wider range of changes can be trialed. As a result, ops leaders can conduct more research to discover optimal changes that will push terminal performance even higher.
What’s next: The future of terminals with 3D visualization
Today’s marine and intermodal terminals are under pressure to increase throughput within the confines of their existing yard and operations. The only way to reach those goals is by using technology to enable a smarter, more efficient way of running the terminal.
The good news: smarter, more efficient operations is exactly what 3D visualization unlocks. With better data visibility and improved tools for simulating and forecasting yard activity, platforms like Tideworks’ Terminal View are helping ops leaders modernize their terminals while delivering clear business impact.
See for yourself how Terminal View can transform your operations—request a demo today.