Microsoft Power Apps Industry Story: Better port operations for a marine towing firm

Marine Towing of Tampa LLC was founded in October 1999 by a group of towing professionals. With a fleet of tugboats carrying out a complex schedule of jobs, the team needs full visibility over their scheduling, task assignments, and fleet management to provide trusted services to their clients.

As a Microsoft customer, Marine Towing of Tampa uses Dynamics 365 Business Central for their financial management. They have also invested in Microsoft Power Apps, and as their port operations grew more complex, they decided to invest in a Power Apps-based solution to streamline their work.

As their business and marketplace evolved, the team at Marine Towing of Tampa saw the need for a consolidated operational platform for scheduling and fleet management that would support their unique maritime requirements.

After consulting with Marine Towing of Tampa, our team proposed the development of a new scheduling application that would augment the core functions and data managed by Dynamics 365 Business Central.

As we will review in this article, the combined solution brings the strengths of Business Central together with specialized maritime capabilities to optimize routes and resource allocation, respond quickly to changing conditions and client needs, and deliver customized reports for better insights into fleet performance, resource use, and overall operational indicators.

A better approach to port operations

Marine Towing wanted to automate different parts of port operations, such as:

• Inbound and outbound scheduling
• Task assignment
• Real-time tracking
• Reporting
• Thorough record-keeping

After evaluating different approaches, the team agreed that a tablet app used by their schedule team could best meet their needs in the real world. With a user-friendly interface, the new app would allow the team to change schedules in real-time, allocate and manage tasks, and do more streamlined and accurate reporting using a dashboard panel.

Let’s look at the solution’s design and capabilities in more detail.

The application's comprehensive dashboard screens are one of its major features. These screens display up-to-date information on port operations and can track and adjust schedules in real time so employees are kept up to date and can respond quickly to changes or concerns.

The application includes dedicated screens for both inbound and outbound operations.

• Inbound screen: The inbound screen displays critical information related to incoming vessels, such as job type, tugboat assignments, vessel details, assigned agents, pilots, and multiple locations involved.
  

• Outbound Screen: This screen displays information about outgoing vessels. It has the same fields as the Inbound screen (Job Type, Tug Order, Vessel, Agent, Pilot, and Multiple Locations) but is for outbound operations.