Located in Bremerhaven, Germany and offering complete intermodal connections to 130 ports worldwide, NTB is one of Northern Europe’s busiest and most important container terminals, handling 3.2 million TEUs annually via continuous 24/7 operations. NTB also serves as the dedicated site for Maersk Line—65 percent of the cargo is transshipment, while the remaining 35 percent represents local imports and exports for the European markets. A Navis customer for more than 16 years with state of the art terminal equipment in place, NTB has achieved 30 moves per hour on average, a level of productivity that the terminal expects will steadily increase over time following the migration to N4.

“N4 is the most advanced and widely-used terminal system on the market; we never considered another provider when tasked with migrating from Navis SPARCS and Express,” said, Marc Dieterich, General Manager Operations, North Sea Terminal Bremerhaven GmbH & Co. “The reliability, scalability and upgradability of N4, combined with its superior functionality, data quality and advanced analytics capabilities, will enable us to take NTB operations and performance to the next-level. This is a necessary investment that will allow us to perform competitively and deliver on evolving market needs in the decades to come.”

For a terminal of NTB’s size and continuous operation, precise project planning and execution around the move to N4 was paramount. Beginning in November 2015, the 15-person NTB project team worked jointly with Navis to migrate the SPARCS 3.7 and Express 2.9 systems to N4 piece-by-piece, focusing on the core system first, followed by the surrounding applications and systems, as well as thorough testing throughout each phase to ensure the system would perform optimally during the go-live. The performance of NTB’s collective project team, in parallel with the ongoing support and partnership of Navis throughout the process, resulted in a smooth—and disruption-free—transition to N4.

“The level of preparedness and attention-to-detail demonstrated by the NTB project team was incredible, and contributed to our collective ability to complete the migration successfully, maintain existing productivity levels, and hit the essential May 1st cut-over date for the new system,” said Guenter Schmidmeir, Vice President & General Manager, EMEA, Navis. “We are thrilled to see our customer of almost two decades cross this important milestone and are confident they will soon begin to experience all of the benefits a more modern platform like N4 has to offer.”