On the plus side, equipment pooling allows for the equipment fleet to be evenly utilised, and it allows terminal operators to order only what they need and therefore manage their peaks and troughs better. If outsourced, a pooling arrangement would also allow the terminal operators to lower their capital investment cost.
On the negative side, there’s the risk of an equipment shortage if all the operations peak on the same day, and pooling would likely mean higher unit costs than owning the equipment, as the equipment owner would need to price in a margin and manage the maintenance at its own cost.
Equipment pooling has to be considered together with the manning system, he adds. “The likely arrangement is that the labour will be pooled as well. The operators will follow their own equipment to whichever terminal they are deployed to for the shift, as the familiarity of operating their own equipment will allow them to achieve a higher efficiency.”
It may also be likely that the pooled equipment will be owned by a company which the terminal operators outsource to. “The smallest equipment units have the best potential of being pooled. These would be the trucks, reachstackers and empty stackers. These are the most mobile, most easily configured and numerous enough in normal operations that there are sufficient economies of scale to pool.”
However, certainly in a highly automated operation, it would be impossible to introduce random pieces of equipment: “It would be close to operating in an almost manual way,” says Mr Chiang.
Drewry colleague, Tze Ping Wong sums up: “I would feel that there are plenty of challenges for such pooling concepts to work effectively. Even when considering scaled down cooperation modes like the pooling of spares, with evident benefits of reduced inventory cost, we do have to be mindful of the prerequisite that the specifications of the equipment and components have to be standardised and common in the first place.
“In reality, there is a high variation in brands, models and specifications even for major crane components like reducers, motors, inverters, brakes, tyres and wire ropes. Similar issues of contention might also occur when limited parts are required by different terminals and, coupled with concerns of processing warranty claims, can make the inventory management process a complex juggling act for the terminal engineering departments.”
