Lauren McKinley:
Hello everyone. Thank you for joining today’s webinar where our panelists will discuss how AI fuels port growth. This session is presented by Everstream Analytics. As a note, all attendee lines will be on mute. If you have any questions throughout the session, please drop them in the Q&A panel and we will do our best to address as many questions as time allows. My name is Lauren McKinley. Today I’m joined by my colleagues, Jon Bovit, Vice President of Public Sector and Trade, and Louis Beaubien, Director of Trade Strategy. Hi, Jon.
Jon Bovit:
Hello, Lauren. Hello, Louis.
Louis Beaubien:
Hi, Jon. Hi, Lauren.
Lauren McKinley:
Great. Thank you. All right, I will turn it over to Jon to discuss today’s agenda and get started with the content.
Jon Bovit:
Appreciate it. Well, welcome everyone. It’s really a pleasure to be speaking with you all today. And Louis again, thank you for taking the time. As we talked about, we will walk through this topic. It’s really interesting. I think everyone will enjoy today’s presentation and as Lauren had mentioned, please let us know any questions. We’re happy to either cover them now or follow up at a later time. But let me cover the agenda because we’re a little pressed for time today, so we’re going to go through things, but really what we’re focused on today is the kind of the challenges that ports and terminal operators are facing. They’re really under pressure and what is that pressure and how can we leverage AI and other approaches to support growth. There’s some opportunities whenever there’s challenges, so we’re going to hit them head-on today. And then what is Everstream solution to address those challenges? And Louis and I, as Lauren had mentioned, are kind of focused in helping ports and terminals today and Louis has an extensive background doing this for years. So we’re excited to talk to you all today.
So as we mentioned, we’ll kind of cover first what are those pressures, what is impacting ports and terminal operators? And then because really understanding that, it really opens up then what are the opportunities there. So why don’t we continue to the next slide, Lauren. There’s a couple of, there’s many things actually leading and impacting ports and terminals these days, but there’s a few that sort of jump out at everyone and I’m sure everyone can relate to these and Louis, I’ll let you comment, but really first going into the pandemic and then coming out of the pandemic, the data is clear. It really drove a lot of growth and challenges, frankly for ports and terminal operators, a lot of different routing and ordering and we’ll talk about that.
There’s also been, lately there’s been some ongoing port and labor negotiations that have been hitting the West Coast and other regional Southeast and Northeast and other areas. And then we’re all experiencing sort of the ongoing economic challenges and concerns that are kind of plaguing various areas of the world, including the United States where demand appears to be ebbing, particularly in certain industries. But Louis, what do you think when you think about these challenges?
Louis Beaubien:
I think one of the things that’s most interesting to me is just the changing trade patterns. And they’re resulting from a lot of reasons. You see economic parameters changing around the world and socio-political ones changing. It’s making almost wholesale changes from one source of supply and raw materials to finding another source. It might be in a different country, it might be with a different company, but it’s causing real big shifts in supply chains. And how we adapt to them is big. Environmental changes that are affecting things like the ability of barge traffic to navigate rivers and create reliable transit points between shipping and landside operations at ports both on import, on the export side and couple that with changing demographics nationally where you’re seeing shifts in how people are working, not just what jobs they’re doing, but changing demand side operations of what goods are coming into a country and how shippers are having to resort to that.
And lastly, just changes in major shipping line fleets. As we move to bigger and bigger ships, it becomes really important for ports and terminals to secure those relationships with terminal operators so that they can make sure they’re actually continuing to keep high traffic volumes as there’s going to be fewer calls at ports and all of those calls carrying substantively more goods. So there’s a lot I think that’s changing the environment.
Jon Bovit:
Yeah, I completely agree. I completely agree. You brought up some really interesting points, which I think we’re going to explore a little further here. In fact, I know we’re going to explore a little further here, but around carbon and other areas. So we’ll get into that. But Lauren, maybe we can go to the next slide.
Yeah. And as I mentioned, the data is clear around, it really looks like an abnormal heartbeat if you look at and you plot out where we’re seeing this data published almost daily now around trade flows and what’s going on in terms of, typically measured in terms of, if you’re not familiar, in terms of TEUs or TEU equivalents, 20-foot equivalent units, TEUs. But you can see it’s gone up and down and up and down. And now what we believe we’re seeing is sort of a little more normalcy coming out as things have normalized, but these factors and challenges are presenting both growth opportunities as well as we’re seeing demand sort of shift and move around. So we do believe this does present some significant opportunities as we engage with clients as well as we analyze the data. But Louis, when you see charts like this on the left and other stats and you’re talking to clients, what comes to mind?
Louis Beaubien:
I think the biggest thing I notice is that when you’re looking at transit through a port, there’s always seasonal shifts in terms of the volume that’s coming through and there’s also demand shifts that go with economic cycles. But at the end of the day, a port is built for a certain size of throughput and the ability to actually smooth and guarantee that you have a certain stable level of cargo through the port to make sure your revenue is stabilized is key. And when you’re dealing with all these shifts in supply chain, shifts in economic situations, it makes it harder to find that stability and that regular flow. So I think any intelligence, and again, I think I am foreshadowing, I think any intelligence that leads towards how we can secure more revenue going forward, maybe longer contracts and better contracts with shippers and shipping lines is a way to get that stabilized revenue over time and facilitate growth.
Jon Bovit:
Yeah, fantastic. And those of you that don’t know Louis, I think you live at the port, don’t you? In Halifax. So you’re experiencing some of this day in and day out, so.
Louis Beaubien:
I don’t actually live at a port. I live in a port [inaudible 00:13:15].
Jon Bovit:
That’s the way I think of you. Whenever I think of you, I think of, hey, he lives at the port. He knows everything, so. But one of the things that as we’ve been engaging, particularly I would say over the last six months or so, but Louis even longer, what we’re finding is that there’s a competitive advantage in the data that you may be sitting on or data that’s available out there to really understand and take advantage of these dynamics that are going on. So with trade flows and ebb that are changing and moving up and down, there’s gold in those hills. And as Louis and I are rolling up our sleeves and engaging more and more with clients and ports and terminal operators, we’re seeing the advantages that can be obtained from just the data that’s available that typically you’re sitting on is there. So Louis, I don’t know what your thoughts are as we kind of transition and dig in a little bit more, but I think this is just a big opportunity that a lot of companies are sitting on.
Louis Beaubien:
Well, yeah, completely. First of all, my sleeves are actually rolled up, but.
Jon Bovit:
Yeah, point taken.
Louis Beaubien:
But it’s important. Again, I’ll go back to what I was saying before. When you think about a port, especially at a time when there’s other factors at play in terms of modernization and updating infrastructure, like going anywhere from something massive like building a new berth to something smaller like buying new equipment, you want to make sure that you have the cash flows and the revenues to support those investments going forward. And understanding how we can capture business and bring it in is crucial. The only way we’re going to do that is making sure if we have quality information and quality data to make those decisions. There’s that old expression, and I know it’s trite, but garbage in, garbage out. If we don’t really understand our data, we’re not going to get the right decisions coming out of that. We can’t just rely on instinct to drive an industry of this size. We need data.
Jon Bovit:
Yeah, no, fantastic. And as we start to drill in a little bit more, I know you, I, and the team that have been working with clients have really been leveraging AI and data science and machine learning to really uncover these areas. So let’s kind of talk about those and what are those areas that we’re seeing? The first is, is by analyzing the data, we can really identify revenue opportunities. So in other words, opportunities for growth that are maybe certain customers are shipping through alternate ports and maybe a particular port wants to take advantage of those insights because now they can see them. The other thing that we’ve seen pretty substantially is, is that there’s a certain risk that’s presented to ports and terminals to their operations. Could be in the form of weather risks, climate risks, sustainability, forced labor are big topics right now. So there’s a lot of potential operational risks and you want to be able to avoid disruptions.
Obviously the Baltimore situation was just tragic and those types of things don’t happen very often, but there are lots of things that do happen quite often that could be avoidable with better sensing and detection. The other thing that a lot of this data can help is with operational efficiency. And Louis, I’ll pass you the baton in a second to maybe talk about that a little bit more and other thoughts that you may have. By analyzing the data, you can also look to optimize pricing and packaging of the offerings that you’re bringing to market, understanding the market and the trends that are out there and then allowing to adapt to these changes and these challenges that we’ve touched on. So Louis, what are your thoughts as you think about some of these topics?
Louis Beaubien:
Well, there’s a couple that come to mind. The first one is really around kind of where you left it with the idea of optimizing operations and optimizing agreements you have with partners. If you can bring in some of the data that we’re able to attack and bring in that looks at economic trends and supply chain trends, it gives you more power in terms of your ability to make quality decisions going forward when you’re making agreements with shipping lines and other stakeholders so that it might be possible to do an effective pricing strategy for a long-term agreement so that you can better forecast what your revenues are going to be like going three and five years down the line because you have a solid plan on the volume of TEUs that are coming through the port. And if you have that understanding, then you also know what kind of investments you need to make.
Do you need to be investing in material around the berths? Do you need to be investing in new cranes or new reach loaders and how do you plan that equipment out so it can be the most effective? If all of a sudden you’re moving to cargo that is very much sensitive to temperature, then maybe a requirement in a new reefer bay to support those containers that require temperature control and power is crucial. So that sort of planning is I think where AI can really come in and help with operations.
But the other thing I want to say goes back to what you were saying at the beginning. Obviously it’s impossible to predict a black swan event. That’s the nature of the name, black swan. Anybody that tells you that they can predict them is clearly crazy. But what AI can do is help you figure out planning strategies so that when something unpredictable happens, you have the tools around you to be able to know what your options are. How you can deal with unintended consequences is something that you can plan for. Not in the sense of knowing what the consequence is or knowing what the outcome is, but knowing what resources you can rely on to adapt your operations is something that’s very, very manageable and something we can attain through effective modeling, which again relies on effective quality data.
Jon Bovit:
Yeah, totally agree. Thanks. I think we’ll go to the next slide. And we touched on it a little bit, but now is a good time to kind of drill in. I think you and I, I think it’s fair to say you and I are, as we’re engaging with clients globally now, there’s a huge push whether it’s a governmental push or a corporate push just on behalf of clients because clients are looking and consumers are looking for it, a better carbon footprint and sustainability strategy. I think we’re seeing now pretty much every company putting out a sustainability report. They call it an ESG report, and I think clients and customers now are demanding this. I don’t know, what are your thoughts, Louis as you’ve been talking to clients?
Louis Beaubien:
Mostly the same, honestly, Jon. And I think one of the things that you find, especially with ports that are deeply embedded in an urban environment where there’s an entire city built around them, the needs for sustainable reporting, but also the ability to take some of that data and make it actionable. It has to be actionable intelligence. Just to report the amount of emissions at an aggregate level or something like that or the noise at an aggregate level is less relevant data because you can’t act against it. But what we’ve been able to do is focus and factor those components of pollution and noise and other components that impede the sustainability of a port and make it actionable intelligence because you have to be able to act on it.
And to your point, it’s probably fair to say sustainability reports sadly, and sustainability actions sadly 15, 20 years ago were nice-to-haves from an operational point of view. And I don’t mean to sound trite or dismissive when I say that, but it’s probably true. But as we move forward between stakeholder relations, customer relationships, just economic viability when it comes to the possibility of carbon taxes, let alone government and industry regulations, the need to have a better handle on your sustainability is crucial. And it’s something that you have to be able to communicate, but also something you have to be able to act on.
Jon Bovit:
Yeah. I totally agree, and I don’t think I can remember a recent conversation where it didn’t go to something around carbon or something around sustainability. It literally comes up and it becomes now a top priority. And where there’s a chief sustainability officer now involved with a lot of organizations, which is I think a great change. And the technology and the data is now available to, like you said, measure, but then take action on, so it’s important. So next slide, Lauren. So we’re going to start now kind of transitioning into how we can help. We talked about so far what are the challenges? The data now and the AI and the data science in particular is available to offer up measuring and taking action and operationalizing these capabilities to make better informed decisions. So we’re going to touch on a little bit around one of the key areas is, and I know it’s close to Louis’s heart, is data enrichment because there is that notion, stealing from you, Louis, I steal from the best is garbage in, garbage out. Right.
And what we’ve found is one of the key challenges is that if you can’t make sense or there’s just holes in the data, or the cleanliness of the data, it just limits your ability to do very clean analysis and bring out and operationalize. So we’ve focused a lot of our AI expertise on doing that kind of cleaning and enriching. And then, also then once you get really clean data, then you can visualize that, you can put it into terms that, you can make good sound business decisions because looking at clean data and then that sort of leads to then taking actionable insights. What do they tell you so that you can analyze the flow of goods and find the opportunities and then make good and sound and actionable business decisions?
And then I would say finally sort of the last to mention is around, well, there’s probably a need to get data into and out of these types of solutions that Everstream offers. So there’s an integration component, there’s data that’s sitting in your, could be terminal operating systems or shipment tracking or invoicing that you want to get into. And then once things are cleaned up and analyzed, getting it into other systems and combining it really helped to operationalize that. So Louis, what are your thoughts on this?
Louis Beaubien:
It generally is exactly as you said, Jon. I think the biggest thing to me, and I go back to the accessibility of the information too, once it’s been enriched and once it’s been processed, is it has to be something that is useful, that speaks to you as a user. I can tell you the Cronbach alpha of analyzing the data and that number is probably useless to most people.
From a statistical point of view, it’s great, but what does it matter? What we want to be able to know is how your commercial operations are breaking down and how your commercial opportunities might be realized, where your sustainability intensity is, where your problem areas that are intense are, and how we can mitigate them and how we can share this information, the information that we should share with our stakeholder partners. If we’re a port and we’re sharing with a terminal in our city, if we’re a terminal and we’re sharing with the rail lines or the shipping lines, we want to make sure that we can share the data we want to share, but also keep secure the data that we want to keep proprietary and internal to the organization. So building a system that has really been a priority for me, is building a system that allows you that sort of safety and security so that you know, you get to keep the data that’s yours, but when it comes to trying to share it for the purposes of communication, it’s accessible and it’s an easy thing to do.
Jon Bovit:
No, perfect. Thanks. I guess we’re a little behind schedule, so we’re getting pushed along, which is good. But no, I totally agree. And just to kind of walk through how we’ve been leveraging and processing using AI and offering this up to clients is basically it kind of starts from ingesting the data, taking in various, you’re sitting on, probably sitting on a gold mine, you just don’t realize it. So taking it in, cleaning, enriching, transforming it, getting into some form of warehouse that you can then analyze, whether it’s with Everstream tools or combining it with other tools that you already have in-house and then reporting and generating insights. But this is sort of the flow that we’re seeing pretty consistently and we’re leveraging. And have built out AI capability across this entire spectrum, whether it’s from the cleaning and enriching side, the transformation to get better, filling in gaps or cleaning it up, analyzing the data warehouse or the large amount of data that we’ve already cleaned and enriched. And then producing some output and recommendations and insights is kind of what we’re all about. So Louis, any comments on this as we,-
Louis Beaubien:
No, I think that’s a great summary.
Jon Bovit:
Okay, great. Next slide. And we just wanted to include, we have brought this to market, this solution that’s trying to address and helping clients to address all of these challenges. And as we talked about, a lot of it is analyzing, cleaning, and enriching and giving you that data back. So we produced and grabbed some examples of that, but it could be looking at volume and how volume changes over time, how volume is coming through competitive ports, how volume is just frankly is divvied up among your customers, how it’s divvied up among commodities and other products. And so you can clearly and easily see those trends. And even in this simple screenshot, you can see how things have ebbed and flowed much like we’ve touched on. Louis, any comments on this?
Louis Beaubien:
I guess what I’m excited by this is that it shows a deeper level of analysis than you’ve traditionally been able to rely on in the past from a rail or terminal or shipping line perspective. I mean, in the past there’s plenty of services out there, I won’t mention them because I’m not trying to dismiss them completely, but that provide you data based on publicly available customs reporting that shows you what’s coming in and going out of the country, for example. And it can give you a certain level of insight that’s valuable and we’ve relied on that in the industry for a while.
But I think what I’m excited about by this is that it’s a level of analysis beyond that. It lets you see from a regional, or an industry, or a commodity perspective how trade flows are ebbing and flowing. That goes beyond what you can find simply from referring to publicly available customs data. And it creates a real opportunity. And we’ve seen that with some of the customers that we’ve worked with, their ability to understand the supply chain as an economic opportunity, but also from a perspective of planning and resilience of their operations.
Jon Bovit:
Fantastic. And the other, and there’s a few dimensions, and we can kind of flip through a little of these, but just to comment, being able to understand the competitive element, and Louis, you and I have been talking a lot about helping particular ports and terminal operators and even commercial operations understand well what is their competition doing? Where are things flowing? Because understanding the flows, the customers, the end customers and where goods are eventually flowing to and what’s flowing through competitive ports and other alternate methods and routes allows you to really take advantage of those because the key is in once we have good clean data, how do you turn that into revenue? And you and I are seeing that as a big theme now as economic tides ebb and flow, more revenue is always better.
Louis Beaubien:
Yeah. Every single port and terminal that we’re working with now, they definitely see that and know that the major people that ship through their port, the major companies I should say, that ship through their port, whether it’s an importer or an exporter, they don’t just use that port. They use alternative ports and sometimes depending on geography, they might actually be doing landside operations to go to another country and then shipping from that other country’s ports. But we’re able to give you that visibility so you know where all of their goods are going and the transit points at all of their goods. And you might have 60% of their business, but wouldn’t it be great to have 90 or 100% of their business? And I think that’s the interesting opportunity on the commercial side, is that we can see what’s coming through and we can see where the other stuff is going and how do we access that. I think that’s neat.
Jon Bovit:
Totally with you. And the other, I think big innovation that we’re sort of announcing a little more broadly here on the webinar is what we refer to as understanding where the final destination is. And I think ports and terminal operators are really hungry to understand when something goes through the port, where does it ultimately end up? It’s a big challenge right now and that data is very, very difficult to determine. And one of the things that we’ve learned in building out our solution and evolving it particularly more recently is this is a gold mine because this allows you to then say, oh, you’re saying that when something goes through my port and it gets put on a rail line, the ultimate final destination or customer is somewhere else.
We’re able to connect those dots so that they can see, okay, well where do things ultimately end up? Can I go after those customers and offer them a package and increase my revenue, but then also see what’s going through alternate ports so that I can also then go look for and offer them a different alternative and steal that revenue. So what we’re seeing is this becomes a real gold mine. And again, this is something that we’re really focused on right now.
Louis Beaubien:
Yeah, it’s a great opportunity and it’s a chance to grab new customers as well. If you see that your rail line partner is picking up tons of goods in St. Louis, then targeting other importers or exporters in St. Louis with your rail carrier partner perhaps is a great way to drive new customers to using your port from a shipping perspective. So I think it’s valuable. And this is another great example of some of the work we’ve done with the government of Canada. One of the big focuses of the government of Canada is understand multi-port use and as the regulator, understanding the level of resilience and integrity there is in the supply chain. When we’re importing goods, we want to make sure that we know everything that’s coming in from multiple facets of the country and where it ends up because we want to make sure that the goods that are being imported into the country, again, from a regulator’s perspective, are getting to where they need to go.
And then there’s the flip side as well. The other thing that’s crucial to the supply chain, especially from a government policy and regulation point of view, is promoting economic growth. And so when you’re looking at the use of the supply chains as a vehicle for the export of goods, this level of understanding of data becomes crucially important. So we’ve done a lot of work in terms of focusing on the very precise flows of imports and exports with the government of Canada. And as the slide notes, we’ve decreased processing time by vast amounts because we’re able to process data as it happens straight from its digital form. And this has led to increases in accuracy largely because we’re able to make sure that the quality data is there because part of the AI engine deals with the correction function to improve quality, and it eliminates the manual processes that sometimes slow down data but also introduce the possibility of error. So this has been a really exciting implementation,-
Jon Bovit:
Yeah. And I think that the whole idea and the benefits of doing this, and I think to our customers is around operationalizing, right? So if you get clean data, as you mentioned, we can increase and improve accuracy, decrease processing time, and then that amounts to savings just by itself because people aren’t wasting time digging around. But then I think the final thing that you and I were talking about just before this call is, and we didn’t necessarily put on this slide, but it’s the increase in revenue because when we’re identifying these challenges and avoiding disruption and looking at where the potential for different revenue streams, that is the big one. So we can decrease costs. That’s good. We can get more revenue. That’s good. And what we’re seeing is really big opportunities there and we’re getting the flag. So we’re going to have to, I think, transition it back to Lauren because we’re at time. But again, thanks Louis for your time. I think it’s been great.
Louis Beaubien:
Thanks Jon. I’ve enjoyed it.
Lauren McKinley:
Thank you, Jon. Thank you Louis. We appreciate the presentation today. Team, I know we are right up at time, so we will have to follow up with any questions individually, and we will make sure that we add questions to our follow-up communications for all of you who have watched this webinar. So you get the latest insights and follow up from the team. Louis and Jon are available for further conversation related to how we can use AI to drive and leverage these port insights and really build value in your business. So if you have any questions, please reach out to us at [email protected].
We also have all of this great content summarized in a new webinar here. So if you’re looking to read more, learn more about the examples that we’ve outlined today on the session, you can scan the QR code here or visit our website and download the latest white paper here, How AI Enhanced Data Fuels Port Growth. So we want to thank you again for your time everyone. Everyone will get a recording after this session. Again, if you have questions, please reach out to our team and thank you again to our presenters, Jon and Louis for a great presentation today. With that, we will close out the session. Thank you so much everyone. Have a great day.
