This month, XVELA announced that Ocean Network Express (ONE), the new carrier formed from the merger of the three Japanese lines, will use the cloud-based XVELA platform for collaborative stowage planning. It is understood MOL and NYK are using Navis PowerStow, one of the legacy products that is now part of XVELA, whereas K Line uses another application.

This is an important milestone for XVELA, and a step in the direction towards collaboration to achieve greater efficiency that the company is trying to drive the industry towards.

“ONE endeavours to achieve new levels of efficiency, and deliver a new standard of service to our customers,” said a ONE executive. “We believe that XVELA’s innovative collaborative solution will enable us to work more effectively with our operational partners around the world, in order to attain these goals.”

Using XVELA creates the opportunity for ONE to work more closely with terminals, sharing stowage plans in real time on the cloud, and thus facilitating more collaborative vessel planning at box terminals. Speaking with World-Cargo News, Guy Rey-Herme, CEO of XVELA, said all terminals called at by ONE will need to connect to XVELA to “fully leverage the many-to-many collaboration capabilities of the platform”.

While getting the full benefit of XVELA depends on the active participation of terminals it calls at, “ONE can begin to reap the benefits of XVELA – improved stowage plan quality, better visibility into the vessel call, etc – as soon as they begin collaborating with a single called-at terminal on the platform,” said Rey-Herme. “XVELA has also provided ways of working around ‘holes’ in a carrier’s network (e.g. carriers can upload a terminal BAPLIE directly into XVELA) if certain terminals are slow to get on board.”

XVELA also expects that the ONE deployment will ultimately produce a domino effect, as any terminal activated on the platform as part of a carrier’s network can connect with subsequent lines that join. “So, as more carriers join the network, and their networks inevitably overlap, the process of connecting each carrier’s terminal network will become faster and easier,” said Rey-Herme.

XVELA expects ONE will aim to connect one complete string/rotation, and expand from there. Connecting ONE’s terminal partners to XVELA will be a joint effort by ONE and XVELA. As a customer, ONE is, of course, in a position to influence that process. Rey-Herme emphasised that XVELA will, itself, be reaching out to terminals to introduce the platform and the value it can deliver to their businesses. He described the process of getting terminals signed up to XVELA, and authorised users set up on the platform, as “relatively simple”, aided by the fact that XVELA sister company Navis has around 330 terminals in its ecosystem.

“The process of activating terminals on the XVELA platform takes a fraction of the time of traditional onpremise software deployments, due to its SaaS delivery model,” said Rey-Herme. “Joining the XVELA network requires no massive IT infrastructure, resources or hardware costs. And, since XVELA’s collaboration tools complement terminal operators’ existing tools, rather than replacing them, adoption can be gradual, eliminating the deployment issues and risks typical of ‘big bang’ go-lives.”

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This complete item is approximately 300 words in length, and appeared in the November 2017 issue of WorldCargo News, on page 27. To access this issue download the PDF here.