Change, we\u2019re often reminded, is constant. But even those who agree with the adage feel a bit unsettled when found in the midst of some disruptive change. However, you better get used to that feeling.<\/p>\n
Unless you\u2019re the proverbial Ostrich with your head stuck in the sand it\u2019s hard to miss the constant stream of news heralding change, especially in our industry. Mergers, acquisitions, major advancements, and expansions of portfolios, personnel, and products make it seem like we\u2019re changing at a breakneck pace, presumably to be \u2018better\u2019 and \u2018more competitive\u2019. But are we, really?<\/p>\n
Putting a few automated terminal developments aside, when we compare news like this with other industries a different picture develops. It’s a picture of manic activity but minimal real change to our underlying businesses, their value and their competitiveness.<\/p>\n
Competition, even for many of the world\u2019s most innovative companies, is no longer coming just from places like China and India. Today, it can come from small teams of people passionately assembled in a basement with a start-up leveraging accelerating technologies. YouTube, you may recall, went from a start-up funded by a founder\u2019s credit card to being acquired by Google for over $1bn in just over 18 months. Those sort of dynamic, entrepreneurial start-ups are largely absent from the port and terminal sector.<\/p>\n
The flipside of the evolution of these billion-dollar startups is that hundred-year-old industry stalwarts are closing their doors. Take Kodak, for example. In 1996, Kodak had a $28bn valuation and over 140,000 employees. In 2012, it went bankrupt. That same year, a new entrant in the photography business called Instagram was purchased by Facebook for $1bn. Instagram had been founded only a year before and had, at the sale, a whopping 13 employees.<\/p>\n
This led to an absolute disruption of Kodak’s business through new technology harnessed by a very small organisation utterly unconcerned by traditional business models, distribution channels, product development, or organisational bureaucracy of any kind. It would take years for Kodak to design, launch and iteratively improve a new product. For Instagram, an image-centric social media app and key Kodak disruptor, this took a few months. And once Instagram had a viable product, its model enabled it to deliver future improvements quickly and automatically without its customer ever leaving their couch or touching their wallet. All of these elements combined to enable exponential change for Instagram while Kodak was left in a linear death march.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Read all about it<\/strong> <\/p>\n The concepts of disruptive, innovative technologies and the organisations that are creating them are presented in a book entitled ‘Exponential organizations’ (Salim Ismail, Michael Malone & Yuri Van Geest). The book attempts to explain why these technological innovations are emerging now (and not before), and how companies big and small must act accordingly to simply remain, let alone remain relevant.<\/p>\n The key aspect of the book is that technologies such as computing and the internet, bio and nano-technology artificial intelligence, energy, and medicine can help achieve exponential adoption when put forward. In the authors’ view, an exponential organisation, or ExO, is one whose output is enormously large compared with its employee count because of its use of the internet, automation and innovative technology.<\/p>\n From the dawn of the industrial age to the dawning of this internet age, productivity per employee has improved. But that improvement has been, save a few big innovations, a relatively slow progression of linear steps. However, these exponential organisations seem different. Rather than use armies of people or large physical plants, exponential organisations leverage information technologies, taking that which was once physical in nature and integrating the functional, virtual nature of it into our lives. Things like 35mm cameras, handheld GPS devices, and physical media (books, LPs, CDs, and so on) have now morphed into apps on our phones.<\/p>\n The evolution of fully automated container terminal operations may very well be a dramatic productivity improvement over the status quo. But when looking at all the factors of its production, it still seems like a relatively small, linear step of improvement.<\/p>\n Our charge now then seems to be to predict the implications that these exponential technologies will have on our industry and to begin preparing our own organisations accordingly. This should not be through over-specification of the next linear steps to bring modest improvement, but through harnessing, and then sharing, relevant information that can bring about a 10x better, faster or cheaper port complex than the best we have today.<\/p>\n Allen Thomas is the vice president of operations for APS Technology Group (a member of the ABB Group), a global leader in OCR and process automation technology solutions for marine container terminal operators, freight railroads and other supply chain logistics providers. Mr Thomas has over 20 years of experience in building and implementing IT and automation systems for the global transportation industry. Were just not innovating enough, warns APS Technologys Allen Thomas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":4137,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[308],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-4136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-port-talk"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4138,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4136\/revisions\/4138"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4136"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=4136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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