–
Naviera Armas Trasmediterránea is the leading shipping group in Spain and one of the main in Europe in the maritime transport of passengers and ro-ro cargo sector. Faced with the health risk situation triggered by Covid-19, the group established new protocols to guarantee the safety of its customers and its employees.
Among the measures implemented, the creation of a new “last meter” boarding control system stands out, aimed at eliminating any type of physical contact, streamlining the process, guaranteeing identity control and, at the same time, reinforcing commitment company environment.
Naviera Armas Trasmediterránea entrusted Plain Concepts, Microsoft partner, to design and deploy a new system that would give it the ability to meet all its objectives. To do this, it chose the Xamarin open source platform, which allows the development of applications with a great advantage over other alternatives on the market: developers can focus on a single language, .NET, to launch the project.
Subsequently, Xamarin makes it easy to bring to different operating systems, such as Android or iOS, an optimized app that achieves native performance and appearance on each platform. All this significantly accelerating development, which has also taken advantage of Azure DevOps solutions, which has allowed Plain Concepts to streamline processes and have a first release of the project in just four weeks, much less time than usual in this type of project. With the first release it is already possible to do the process digitally through the wallet or mobile support.
“One of the basic criteria for deploying the project was the need to do it in a very agile way, in order to begin its implementation as soon as possible given the continuous advance of the pandemic. Xamarin, the DevOps philosophy and the flexibility of Microsoft’s cloud have made it possible to meet the deadlines that we had set to make the necessary platform available to our crews to reinforce security against the pandemic ”, says Daniel Ramos, CIO of Naviera Trasmediterránea Weapons.
Process simplification to make life easier for passengers
The Naviera Armas Trasmediterránea project arises with the aim of eliminating contact during boarding control, but the deployment has managed to meet many other objectives that place the shipping group at the forefront of its sector.
Traditionally, the passenger had to go through a check-in process, in which he had to print his boarding pass before going to the control located at the access to the ship. Once the implementation of the project is completed in all the ports where the shipping company operates, passengers will only have to worry about acquiring their tickets through the group’s website and going to the boarding area on the appointed day.
There, just by showing an official identification document, such as the DNI or the passport, the Naviera Armas Trasmediterránea staff will use a contactless hand scanner that, thanks to the application developed with Microsoft technology, extracts the personal data from the document and cross it with the shipping list in the Azure cloud or downloaded locally.
In this way, the crew visualizes in real time the information about the tickets purchased, which may include other companions, or the right of access of a vehicle to the hold of the ship, for example.
“With this solution – says Daniel Ramos, CIO of Naviera Armas Trasmediterránea – we managed to speed up boarding and eliminate any situation that requires physical contact between the crew, the passengers and their documents. In this way, we also managed to take a further step in terms of sustainability and do without printing tickets and boarding passes, which account for more than five million units each year ”.
“Our goal is to globalize paperless shipping in as many ports as possible. Our bet differs from other access systems by simplifying the work of the passenger, who does not need to install a specific application and, in most situations, does not need to do an additional check-in at the port or before arriving at the same except in those cases that the legislation requires ”, adds Daniel Ramos.
Only in cases where the regulations of the port authority where the boarding is made requires the presentation of an additional document, it will be necessary for the passenger to show a code that can be loaded on his mobile through Passbook, a process that is also has been simplified to the extreme so that the passenger can board with maximum ease.
A multiplatform solution open to present and future needs
The choice of Xamarin as the development platform allows Plain Concepts to take the application to different operating systems with minimal effort and the guarantee that its operation will be equivalent to that of a native application for each system, whose development would imply an additional investment, both economically. as of time.
Currently, Naviera Armas Trasmediterránea uses its ruggedized devices with a contactless camera or scanner and governed by Android. The use of a customized application, supported by the Microsoft cloud, allows the shipping company to reduce the cost of deployment throughout the fleet, reducing the investment in hardware up to a quarter of what a dedicated solution with specific hardware would suppose. Thanks to the deployment of versions through M365, it is possible to do it in an agile and centralized way.
In this way, Naviera Armas Trasmediterránea, with the help of Plain Concepts and Microsoft technology, places itself in a privileged position to evolve its new boarding system when necessary and face any future challenge.
About Naviera Armas Trasmediterránea
Naviera Armas y Trasmediterránea is the leading shipping group in Spain and one of the main in Europe in the maritime transport of passengers and ro-ro cargo sector. It transports more than five million passengers annually, has a fleet of 40 passengers that connects the main ports of four countries and operates more than 100 passenger and cargo connections on the Balearic, Canary Islands, Ceuta, Melilla, Morocco and Algeria routes.
–
