Navig8 Group disrupts shipping industry with business intelligence powerhouse in Tableau

Navig8 Group is a global provider of integrated shipping services spanning across commercial pool management, fuels and offshore operations. With main offices in Singapore and London, Navig8 manages a portfolio of vessels for a wide network of oil companies, commodities traders and ship owners.

With transparent financial and operational reporting of near real-time data, Navig8 assures fleet owners of cost efficiency and high-quality maintenance. Enterprise Architect Nick Gole shares how they created a single source of truth in Tableau with an integrated data warehouse, providing a “one-stop shop” of shipping services from ship management, chartering, operations to fuelling.

As an integrated services platform working across international shipping routes, Navig8 worked with multiple data sources across different divisions and back-end systems. Before Tableau, each data source would be exported to Excel, and different people would put the data together for their own reporting needs. Everyone was using different Excel sheets and creating inconsistent ad hoc reports.

“It was extremely dangerous to move data around like that,” recalls Nick. “We could have had potential consequences such as misreporting and compliance issues.”

With Tableau, all of Navig8’s nine back-end systems such as their bunkering operating system, credit risk and enterprise resource planning package were integrated within a single data warehouse. Their partner Oak Consulting played an instrumental role in helping them build this data lake in Tableau, and today, all of Navig8’s business units use this data warehouse, shares Nick.

Within the past three years, the business has seen significant returns. Integrating over 200 entities from their finance package into the data warehouse has helped Navig8 eliminate the need for 400 Excel sheets and month-end finance reports, which used to take up to 20 man days of effort every month by a team of people solely working on these reports.

“With Tableau, all our financial data is available in one click, and our CFOs can get any information they want anytime.”

A vital part of the Navig8 business is the fuels division, Integr8, which helps secure the best deals to fuel all the ships running in their commercial and offshore pools. Fuel makes up the heaviest cost for a ship, with some ships running on up to 100 tonnes a day. Monitoring the efficiency, productivity and profit margins of the fuels business is vital, and Tableau now enables Navig8 to visualise these stats in a single planning dashboard, as opposed to over 50 Excel sheets previously just for the Integr8 business. Today, 10 tabs in a Tableau workbook gives Navig8 a clear overview and visibility into the day-to-day bunkering operations of the fuels division.

One of the biggest rewards of visualising data in Tableau is giving business users “one snapshot of their whole workspace”, shares Nick. While previously they had to rely on Excel and PDF reports distributed by email, now every team has their own dashboards tailored to their needs.

For example, different members of the offshore team get data coming in from the offshore ships at different levels of visibility depending on their roles and what kind of data they require. This makes sure that when they come to their computers every morning, they can easily find the specific information they are looking for, drilled down from the same stack of data everyone else on their team gets access to.

With business intelligence at a glance, the offshore team uses a “traffic light system” in Tableau which automatically flags up problem areas in red, while smooth-running operations get lit up in green. This greatly simplifies the data for both the management and team by highlighting only the ships in each fleet they need to focus on for the day.

“The biggest benefit of Tableau is self-help, because you are empowering users to do self-service analytics,” says Nick. In the past with limited visibility into their data and no drill-down capabilities to answer questions, all business users had to rely on the analyst team to build reports, which could take up to two weeks, resulting in outdated data.

“Tableau has completely changed Navig8’s culture from being a data consumer to a company which sees actual commercial value in our data,” shares Nick. “Ordinary business users have become much more strategic in their thinking and work, because they can see and understand a lot more now with the ability to drill down on problem areas to fix them.”

With business users becoming more proactive, the analyst team has moved on to high-value work such as predictive modelling and building more strategic dashboards for the business, instead of constantly manipulating Excel sheets and answering questions.

Tableau has given Navig8 competitive advantage in terms of greater transparency with customers by sharing deeper insights and real-time data, shares Nick.

“We are now able to provide a lot of information and strategic insights to our customers which we could not do before, at a much better frequency, improving from monthly to daily communications.”

Navig8 maintains a leading edge with a new depth, breadth and speed of information they can now provide to their customers, such as how they are making better commercial decisions for their ships, and how they position their fleets to help clients yield more profit.

“I don’t think many companies are in this space yet, where we are connecting our data sources and creating data models to do real-time reporting across our entire group,” says Nick. “And that’s why I think Oak Consulting has been a fundamental strategic partner to us.”

Oak Consulting is a Gold Tier Tableau value-added reseller and cloud solutions provider based in Singapore and Malaysia, providing data management and data analytics consulting services. They specialise in industries such as healthcare, education, retail and eCommerce, telecommunications, finance, shipping, airport hub, business and public services.