How Datylon Helped Port of Antwerp Improve Their Management Reporting

Port of Antwerp

Yves Adriaensen is Head of Market Intelligence at the Port of Antwerp, the second largest port in Europe and an important global shipping hub.

“By condensing vast amounts of information into a more attractive and readable format, busy port Executives now understand what the data is saying and can make better decisions.”

The Port Monitor

Each month they collect and process a high volume of data on shipping, seaborn cargo and container traffic. That data is coming from many different sources and is being handled across many different tools and platforms.

“We spend a lot of time collecting and analyzing the data and it’s very important to us that we can communicate these insights to others in the company. That’s why each month all this information is consolidated by my team into a report.”

This report is being called the Port Monitor. It is being distributed each month to over 60 people in the extended management team.

Main Challenges

Analysts were spending a lot of time collecting data and updating the report
It was hardly ever read by the management team
Managers start asking individual questions to the analysts, creating even more work

All the data was being summarized using charts. But as it turned out, it was very difficult for the managers to retrieve specific information from those charts. They contained far too much information so the key understandings were getting lost.

For Yves and his team, updating this report every month was a lot of work. Because updating the data also meant restyling all the charts.

“As the report became less and less read over time, we were getting more questions from Managers about the data. This process was very time consuming and led to frustrations on both sides.”

Solution

“So we needed to go back to the drawing board and design our charts in a way that they’re easier to digest for everyone. We counted on Datylon to provide us with the complementary expertise in Data Visualization.”

In order to tackle these challenges in the most efficient way, Yves has called on the expertise of Datylon. With our software and with the support of our experts, a new tailor-made recurring monthly report template was designed. The focus of this exercise was on what exactly the managers wanted to get out of this report.

By talking to different stakeholders we were able to deduce what info everyone was looking for.
A reusable reporting template was designed using Adobe illustrator and Datylon for Illustrator.
Analysts create new reports using the Datylon web app and the reusable reporting template.

Results

A report with 57 pages was reduced to 15 pages
The engagement within extended management team has increased tremendously
The analysts are now able to update the report with losing styling efforts
The analysts have far less work communicating their insights
They have a strong visual on-brand language for communicating data
Parts of the report are now also being used for wider communication

“By condensing vast amounts of information into a more attractive and readable format, busy port Executives now understand what the data is saying and can easily retrieve the information they need to make decisions.”