Case Study: Mediterranean Shipping Company achieves real-time visibility and faster decision-making with Microsoft Power BI

Getting the world’s goods where they need to go

Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), a global shipping leader with 480 vessels, nearly 2.6 million container capacity, and 24,000 employees, needed to turn massive, fast-moving operational data into timely business information — a challenge made urgent by the IMO’s SOLAS rule requiring verified container weights and real-time monitoring of roughly 130,000–140,000 containers weekly. To bridge the gap between data and decision-making, MSC adopted Microsoft Power BI alongside Microsoft SQL Server 2016 and Analysis Services.

MSC implemented SQL Server 2016 Analysis Services tabular models integrated with Microsoft Power BI (hosted in Azure) and Office 365 to deliver near-real-time, browser-accessible dashboards and self-service reporting. The change sped queries by 30–50%, supported 550 million transactions per day, and during the SOLAS rollout allowed MSC to process 20,000–30,000 U.S. container moves in a week while leaving only nine containers behind for customer reasons — eliminating reporting bottlenecks and putting gigabytes of actionable data into managers’ hands.

Mediterranean Shipping Company

Fabio Catassi

Chief Technology Officer