TowWorks Harnesses Data For Operational Efficiency

From company founder Richard Tiller’s days as a student at Delta State University in Cleveland, Miss., in the early 1990s to today, TowWorks has grown into an all-in-one software platform designed for the maritime industry and created by industry professionals.

TowWorks allows users to manage their operations and logistics, track compliance tasks, conduct voyage planning, communicate between shoreside and vessel personnel, manage scheduling and streamline accounting—all within the same platform. The company is now operating on its 4.0 platform, which enhances user experience on computers, tablets and mobile phones.

“Our operations piece handles all lines of towing, from line haul to unit tow to tramp towing, every type of towing available,” said Laura Lewis, sales manager for TowWorks. “Ship assist, barge fleeting, all of that’s covered in the operations and logistics platform.”

The TowWorks team is able to research, develop and implement modules as needed and over time, Lewis said.

“We have a new incident module,” she said. “We have a tankerman management module, and we’re coming out with a service module as well that will allow shipyards and service providers to the marine industry to use our platform to track time and transactions.”

Besides a company’s use of TowWorks, the platform also offers portals for customers and vendors, Lewis said; she offered the example of a towing company pushing a group of tank barges that needs to hire a shoreside tankerman company to offload that product.

“They’ll be able to do that programmatically without ever picking up the phone or sending an email,” Lewis said.

Lewis said a characteristic of TowWorks from the beginning has been the nimbleness to respond to customer requests and needs industry-wide. That’s even apparent from founder Richard Tiller growing the company as a small side venture until 2005, when he quit another job to make TowWorks his main focus.

“It’s just kind of grown into what our customers need,” she said.

Like most things these days, TowWorks is cloud-based, with Amazon Web Services providing the hosting and security. Still, the company does offer some old-school downloadability for companies that need it.

“We have an on-computer program that’s installed on boat consoles for companies that have vessels that are out of comms for days at a time,” Lewis said, “because they need to be able to store that information in a database and then replicate it to shore when they have connectivity again.”

Shoreside personnel can track vessels in real-time through the TowWorks portal, eliminating at least one step of the logistics process.

“The routing of transactions through the system automatically based on routing rules and using our TowWorks advanced rate engine just streamlines the whole operational process completely,” Lewis said, “from job scheduling all the way through to assigning the barge or assigning the vessel, and then, finally, to billing. It’s all very seamless, and it happens based on various points of data entry by both the shoreside people, as well as the vessels themselves. As the captain and crew are performing transactions, they’re entering that data into the system, and it’s flowing back shoreside, feeding billing as it goes along.”

With safety and emergency response such a central part of vessel operations, Lewis said TowWorks’ incident management module is one of the newest and most impactful modules of late.

“It allows you to take any type of incident, whether it be an illness or an allision, and work that through insurance and claims, tracking all the costs, tracking all the investigations, the root cause analyses,” Lewis said. “All of that is covered in the incident management module.”

One feature that’s “imminently coming to market” from TowWorks, Lewis said, is SOC 2 compliance, which is a standard for managing and securing customer data.

“It ensures that data held within the TowWorks platform is protected, redundantly, backed up in multiple locations, available 100 percent of the time but also secure 100 percent of the time,” Lewis said. “SOC 2 compliance is a big deal. We’ve been hearing about cybersecurity and how ships and vessels and systems are vulnerable for years now. This is our effort to ensure that our customers’ data is safe.”

TowWorks is used by more than 100 companies, which represent some 1,100 boats and 13,000 barges.