“It is important that the port or terminal benchmarks and establishes metrics which are truly meaningful and impact the bottom line,”he emphasises.

He says any port or terminal operator would agree that measuring productivity is extremely important to their operation.“Without this, the port has no gauge of how it is performing, where it stacks against the competition, or where and how it can improve to obtain a competitive advantage,”he says.

“Furthermore, up to a theoretical ‘point of diminishing returns’, each incremental increase in productivity and operating efficiency provides the port or terminal not only with a direct increase in profitability on the existing cargo base, but also the opportunity to secure additional business as the terminal’s capacity presumably increases with improved productivity.”

Having a highly productive terminal also helps in the retention of shipping companies, which are always trying to get more value from their suppliers,adds Dave Quennell, programme manager at New Zealand software specialist Jade Logistics.

“Measuring productivity helps terminal operators to ensure that they are getting optimal use from their equipment. When planning for replacement or upgraded cargo handling equipment, understanding the capacity of the operation also assists in preparing the business case,”he says.

Mr Quennell believes a port’s ability to measure productivity accurately “really comes down to what capabilities their terminal operating system has in that area – and how efficiently they use those features.

“Customers tend to rate a terminal’s productivity on things like truck turnround times for the road exchange or vessel productivity statistics for the vessel exchange. It is KPIs like this that terminals are interested in at a high level. Having access to such statistics and being able to retrospectively analyse a ship’s performance over a period of time gives a good basis for predictive modelling, which our software will soon be able to do.”

Tideworks, a provider of software solutions for terminal operations and shipping lines worldwide, says the best means is through real-time monitoring of the operations and key metrics that are important to the terminal.

Operations reports and analyses conducted “after the fact” may still serve a purpose – but in general, port and terminal operators want instant access to “live”information about the gate,the yard and quayside operations so that they can make adjustments and react to situations before they become an issue.

“To that end,Tideworks offers a variety of web-based real-time tools and ‘digital dashboards’ – completely configurable to the needs of the operator – that provide an accurate, instantaneous, and user-friendly view into the current operations and productivity metrics most relevant to the port or terminal,” says Mr Schwank. Tideworks’ products also offer the capability of projecting into the future, given the planned workload, to see where productivity issues such as bottlenecking or lack of equipment availability may arise.

Says Mr Quennell: “Our customers tell us that the main advantage of using Jade Master Terminal is the complete integration with all their organisational activities.The solution is available ‘out of the box’ but it deals with the complexity of these complicated businesses in a unique way. All of the features of the entire product suite are available in the one package so terminals can add functionality as and when they need it without costly database upgrades.”

Recently, Jade completed the first phase of its key performance indicators information, which is embedded in the software and can provide reporting across the whole system, he adds.“In particular it looks at KPIs around yard space utilisation and vessel exchange information but subsequent releases will include user-configurable floating dashboards and predictive modelling for ship visits.”

The essential point is that improving productivity can affect the port’s bottom line in a number of ways.“Really, what we are talking about is the efficient utilisation of resources,both machine and human,”says Mr Schwank.

“As an example, if the port operator can perform five additional moves per hour with the same equipment, then the return on the investment of the fixed assets is improved, adding directly to the bottom line.

“They key is in understanding that increased productivity does not necessarily go hand-in-hand with enhanced efficiency. If a port operator utilises six additional pieces of handling equipment and six more equipment operators to obtain that extra five moves per hour,then the cost could well outweigh the benefit. The operator – though more productive on the vessel operation – has not become more efficient.”