As we charge ahead into 2023, Tideworks is prepared to continue providing terminal operators with the industry-best value from our products. We learned essential lessons in 2022 about our clients, products, and emerging trends and have integrated those lessons into our approach for the new year. This blog captures some of our accomplishments, how we’ll onboard what we’ve learned, and looks ahead at terminal operations trends and initiatives to provide strategic recommendations to transform your terminal operations.
What Tideworks Accomplished in 2022
In 2022, the Tideworks team accomplished several milestones, providing terminal operators with a more efficient, streamlined operation. Coupled with transformable service, our products again proved that they are the industry standard.
A Transformed Product Strategy
Historically, Tideworks’ products have been highly customized to meet the unique needs of our clients. However, in 2022, we re-evaluated our products from a wider perspective to improve longevity and better understand customer needs. We took a step back to see how we could deliver a more accessible customer experience out of the box, which resulted in defining our core solutions to allow for scalability and customization options.
Updated Product Strategy and Plan
We updated our product strategy with numerous design-thinking sessions among our product teams. These sessions’ results now guide our vision for Tideworks’ solutions and help ensure it aligns with clients of all sizes around the world.
Guided by the understanding that every terminal is unique, our team approached product portfolio planning focused on hearing more from you. We engaged clients by sharing our internal vision and listening to feedback. The team further optimized our product roadmaps to ensure they aligned with stakeholders’ expectations.
Tideworks’ overarching goal is to constantly set the industry standard for terminal operating systems (TOS), like our Mainsail 10 and Intermodal Pro (IPRO), relied on by global marine and rail terminal operators. Our team remains connected to our clients’ needs, expectations, industry demands, and trends to achieve this.
Specifically, our product strategy in 2022 focused on four main areas.
#1 – Standardizing Product Offerings
Looking ahead, to set the industry benchmark, our product team must continue to identify, stabilize, and sustain the core solutions we deliver to clients via standardization. Doing so helps guarantee ROI and instills their trust in the quality and reliability of our offerings.
This approach also enables us to determine the solution’s essential functionality and integration capabilities to streamline their management and support. For any unique environments, applications, or integration needs, we also identified an extensibility framework that allows us to customize our solution while sustaining our core functionality. Evolving to a more self-service experience has given terminal operators greater control to address their specific needs.
These improvements come packaged with an enhanced, uniform UX for a cohesive look across both desktop and mobile clients. Helping you truly do more with less without sacrificing innovation.
#2 – Reducing Business Friction
We must provide excellent product quality, deployability, and customer engagement to meet clients’ needs. That effort involves removing barriers that might compromise collaboration — both internally and externally.
With the transition from custom implementations to standardized products, we optimized these processes and reduced the client burden involved with making enhancements or facilitating support. This effort substantially decreases turnaround time on product estimates and statements of work from months to weeks.
As collaboration increases internally and product standardization unfolds, we can support clients much faster, streamline product releases and updates, and minimize potential disruptions to business operations.
#3– Developing a Better Data Platform
Enhancing the value of data for terminals means moving away from the current point-to-point integration amongst our products. Instead, creating a more comprehensive data strategy and platform to streamline the data flow between products and standardize the communication between terminals and their external partners.
Our team also continues working hard to develop a robust set of APIs to facilitate seamless integrations enabling customers to leverage predictive analytics and machine learning. And with the recent emphasis on the Marine Transportation Data Initiative, these integration capabilities are more valuable than ever.
#4 – Creating a Cohesive Framework
Forthcoming innovation in the terminal operations industry depends on how well vendors develop integrable products that sync data. Rather than working in silos, products must function holistically as a suite.
We’re developing a portfolio of applications, so clients can access data in new and innovative ways for their various use cases. For example, clients will be able to configure dashboard analytics for themselves, and we’re developing a virtual training platform where users can learn to drive equipment on a terminal. These applications help clients without needing to create code or add additional custom project work.
Implementing a product strategy focused on these four main areas enables Tideworks to develop best-in-class products that meet clients’ needs.
Reviewed Product Roadmaps
This past year, we also updated our product strategy and vision to provide deeper client transparency into our product roadmaps. We worked collaboratively with clients and sought extensive feedback to understand their expectations for our products — now and in the near future. Engaging clients in more frequent and substantial ways in these conversations helps our team gain awareness of the challenges faced across the industry and how we must improve our solutions to address them with longevity in mind.
Further, developing product roadmaps contributes to:
- An improved release cadence
- Higher product quality
- Smoother product upgrades
- Value creation across all customers
At Tideworks, our product roadmaps now consist of:
- A list of quarterly, semi-annual, or annual accomplishments
- Current projects and ideas in development
- Proposed near-term projects and potential long-term projects
Roadmaps enable all the key stakeholders involved in product development to stay on track, preserve essential functionality, and provide the maximum possible ROI to clients.
Improved Support Process
By improving the collaboration between the product engineering and client success teams, the team at Tideworks supports clients more effectively. Product standardization complements this effort by enabling us to provide more uniform support processes with faster turnarounds and self-help resources.
Notably, the product engineering and client success teams built a new, rich, and directly accessible client knowledge base. This repository comprises over 1,000 articles, helping clients find and tackle their basic-level support needs and substantially reducing support-related impacts and downtime.
Transitioned Product and Engineering Teams
Fostering more agile development across product and engineering teams, we transitioned our product development process to the Scrum methodology. Scrum involves continuous experimentation and feedback, enabling teams to provide greater collaborative value at much greater speeds.
With the Scrum approach to product development and collaboration, teams can accomplish tasks in small phases, incorporating appropriate practices at each phase to optimize desired outcomes. Managers can easily track progress using “sprints,” during which teams solve problems or improve functionality. At Tideworks, we leveraged two-week sprints to support agile product development that involved clients throughout the development cycle.
For instance, our response to the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022 (OSRA) readily demonstrated this improvement. With the help of the Scrum approach, we successfully adjusted our products for OSRA compliance and incorporated the regulations within 30 days. Implementing Scrum also increased trust, transparency, and collaboration across our teams and with clients.
Terminal Operations Trends in 2023
In 2023, the terminal shipping industry will hone in on various opportunities, especially those related to data management and analytics. Overall, when it comes to terminal operations trends, there is great interest in returning to the product development fundamentals, such as improving product quality, stability, and ease of deployment.
With that in mind, let’s review some key terminal operations trends we anticipate in 2023.
Greater Data Transparency
With the continuous evolution of operational volume and complexity, software solutions must provide improved data transparency. Adaptable, real-time decision-making hinges on visibility into all operational areas and having data that is actionable.
Cloud Migration To Impact Terminal Operations Trends
Leveraging cloud capabilities is of interest in the industry. There’s a balance between products functioning on-prem and in the Cloud and understanding the best methods for managing them. Choosing whether or not to migrate a given application, database, or other IT resource remains a top priority.
The primary consideration still involves evaluating improved access, scalability, and ongoing costs against migration costs. However, responsibility for simplifying the decisions falls on software providers and their compatibility with all major cloud providers.
Machine Learning and Advanced Analytics
For terminals to expand or optimize their operations, they must navigate resource limitations. This means terminal operators must do more with less to remain competitive.
Streamlining operations despite these constraints requires data-based insights that result in excellent customer service, reduced equipment maintenance, and properly allocated personnel. Machine learning tools enable users to access vast amounts of data, provide rules for data aggregation or standardization, and build advanced models that guide these decisions.
New and Emerging Markets
New technologies have the opportunity to transform terminal operations. For instance, inland rail terminals are able to leverage cloud-based offerings to enhance novel technologies, such as automatic gate-in and gate-out through geo-fenced yards or mobile applications for terminal operation with minimal staffing in the yard. These trends are becoming popular for their cost-effectiveness and ROI.
Potential Initiatives for Terminal Operators in 2023
Looking forward to 2023, what initiatives should terminal operators consider pursuing? Based on the trends mentioned above, it makes sense for terminals to focus their investments on data management and security initiatives.
Leveraging Data
You can think of data as the new oil: with large amounts of it available, you must find ways to extract its maximum possible value. In the terminal operations industry, a tremendous amount of data is available to analyze, but limited ways exist to bridge data across terminal networks or complexes.
Enabling marine and rail terminals to take control of their data and extract actionable insights presents a real opportunity. Looking broadly, terminal operators can significantly optimize their global terminal operations just by leveraging data to guide decision-making. Whether it’s the data collected at the gate or during loading and unloading, each dataset can point to gaps or strengths in your terminal operations.
Strengthening Terminal Security
As more terminals digitize their operations, especially via cloud-based applications, security threats pose greater risks. Staying ahead of these threats requires the prompt deployment of security updates or system hardening.
It is critical for terminal software to remain up-to-date with terminal operations trends that impact security and regulatory updates in order to prevent disruptions in terminal operations. Across the terminal, teams must understand the need to document security maintenance and governance processes. Failure to do so could result in entire systems shutting down, potentially halting terminal operations completely.
Standardized products will enable us to deploy updates and patches with increased speed and no impact on operations.
What to Expect from Tideworks in 2023
At Tideworks, we realize that ease of access is mission-critical to our clients. We can build great products and simplify the process of using them. In 2023, we intend to focus on improving product quality, accessibility, and adoption speed. So, what are some of the initiatives you can expect from us in 2023, and how will our teams achieve them?
Web Application Development
Developing an extensible framework for clients means we can support web browser-based apps that eliminate the need for downloadable ones. Web applications are easy to learn or navigate and can provide the same information when accessed on a tablet, laptop, or cell phone. Unlike downloadable apps, web applications are much easier and faster to customize.
Client Feedback
As we develop and release products, we plan to continue soliciting client feedback. Incorporating their voices at each step of product development allows us to deliver less-complex products, reduce the average client’s learning curve, and help clients visualize the data they need.
Core Terminal Operating Systems
We also plan to leverage this core terminal operating system (TOS) for smaller marine and rail terminals. These solutions will enable a cloud-first architecture with built-in microservices allowing customers to adopt our solutions at a lower cost.
These TOS applications also allow clients to only implement what they need. Our expertise and scale at Tideworks provide best-in-class solutions to clients at a compelling price point. As terminals scale, they can seamlessly implement additional product offerings.
Machine Learning & Data Solutions
Our team also has plans to integrate machine learning tools with our data platform solution. By supporting these tools, terminals will receive recommendations they can review and execute against or reject and provide direct feedback to the machine learning provider. This allows the terminals to have greater data governance and integrity. As clients leverage these models to process large datasets and extract meaningful insights, they will be able to identify critical information for their terminal operations.
Partner with Tideworks in 2023
As 2023 progresses, it’s time to charge forward in our goals and continue finding ways to help terminal operators achieve success no matter the demands the supply chain is experiencing. We set the foundation to transform the way terminal operators leverage our solutions and will continue providing products that ease adoption, allow for greater access to terminal data and scale with them well into the future.
Check out our solutions here to learn more about how Tideworks can transform your terminal operations.