The global shipping industry faces a series of challenges that together have the power to re-shape some strongly-held assumptions about its future growth and direction. The global ports community is no different; the potential for changes in demand, to business relationships and infrastructure development is considerable.<\/p>\n
Shipping and ports form crucial links in a supply chain that is also becoming increasingly digital and ever more transparent. In order to prosper in the long term there is an emerging understanding that they must work much more closely, adopting complementary technologies and business practices.<\/p>\n
The industry downturn that began in 2008 made clear that shipping had the potential to operate at a much higher level of efficiency than previously. The classical response in such circumstances is to cut costs and seek \u2018low-hanging\u2019 improvements. This may have removed some short term pain but it is clear that the more fundamental problems have not been solved.<\/p>\n
This inefficiency means that, for sectors which are highly commoditised and for the most part debt-financed, there is a real threat of disruption and transformation from \u2018asset-light\u2019 players. In both shipping and ports sectors, there is a huge amount of finance and capacity at risk.<\/p>\n
Better and faster<\/strong><\/p>\n Whether supply chain newcomers really view shipping and ports as lucrative markets ripe for disruption is open to question. Just as likely is that larger shippers simply want the existing arrangements to work better and faster than they have in the past.<\/p>\n Information and Communications Technology is key to this conversation because it reflects the potential for exponential advances in adoption, a wave that will quickly overwhelm the industry\u2019s traditionally slow attitude to technology take-up.<\/p>\n Advances not just in processing power and mobility, but also battery performance, bandwidth and network deployment are fundamentally affecting our relationships to ICT.<\/p>\n We spend a lot of time talking with the market leaders across shipping and ports to help them understand that investment in ICT not only provides short term efficiency, but can also optimise their business and enable them to be future-ready.<\/p>\n It is true that large ports and shipping companies often have big IT budgets but the majority is for consumables rather than for strategic investments. Our understanding is that few players in the industry are yet to fully understand that ICT can be one of the key factors for much more fundamental change.<\/p>\n There is very little opposition to the argument that the information and operational links between ship and ports and terminal need to be increased and improved. To begin that process requires an engagement on a number of levels.<\/p>\n Standardise first<\/strong><\/p>\n The first principle to grasp is that the application of standardisation in ICT will allow technology adoption and therefore collaboration to occur at an accelerated rate.<\/p>\n With standardisation comes the ability to properly analyse business needs and get a real understanding of the value of data residing within an enterprise. Once this is done it is possible to create new tools to unlock that value and create collaborative relationships.<\/p>\n The obstacles to this approach are not all, as one might assume, all financial. The biggest barrier tends to be the industry\u2019s home-grown IT environment which has created a protectionist approach towards standardised, open systems.<\/p>\n But ports and shipping companies alike are coming to understand that a system that stops at the terminal gate or that fails to give their customers access and cannot respond to changing demands, is going to put them at a disadvantage.<\/p>\n In Greece, Ericsson has provisioned port and terminal customers with ICT for automated gate access, in-motion weighing and systems integration, transforming a range of manual processes into a fully automatic system, with information shared across the ecosystem of terminal users.<\/p>\n Our work with an Asian bulk carrier operator applying deep change processes and improving communications has resulted in internal efficiency improvements and a way to break the \u2018collaboration boundary\u2019, promoting connectivity with partners and suppliers.<\/p>\n Transformations such as these are an iterative process, designed to continue developing as the industry evolves. The reason is clear: shipping and ports will continue to confront challenges for which ICT is an opportunity to draw the supply chain closer together, drive efficiencies and create better ways of working. We believe it is an opportunity not to be missed.<\/p>\n John Taxgaard is vice president, Global Marine Services at Ericsson AB.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ericsson AB\u2019s John Taxgaard explains the benefits of closer supply chain and ICT integration<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":5069,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[308],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-5068","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\/5068","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=5068"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5070,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5068\/revisions\/5070"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5068"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=5068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}