In 2002, following major disruption at container terminals the length of the US West Coast, a master collective bargaining agreement was struck between the employers’ organisation, the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), and the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU), the body representing organised dock labour on the US Pacific Coast. This has made possible a quantum leap forward in technology implementation.<\/p>\n
“The agreement, ” explains PMA president Jim McKenna, “clarified the language governing the eventual implementation of new technology at terminals on the West Coast.”<\/p>\n
Initially, the ILWU had been opposed to the introduction of technology such as OCR and RFID systems, because it feared a massive loss of jobs. However, by adopting new technology, once congested terminals operating at the limit of their engineered capacity have found ways of speeding up throughput. The result, notes McKenna, is that jobs have been gained due to the significant volume increases being handled.<\/p>\n
“Employees who formerly had to be physically present on truck lanes to manually input data are now up in towers collecting information remotely by the use of cameras, ” he states.<\/p>\n
Longshore marine clerks who perform work functions at terminal gates have been the group most impacted by the recent move away from manual systems and towards technology. However, prior to the implementation of technology, demand for clerks was so high that operators had to resort to filling posts with either longshoremen or casuals. Nevertheless, efficiencies gained through the introduction of technology have significantly reduced the demand for clerks in some areas, which has helped facilitate the opening of gates at non-peak hours.<\/p>\n
“Previously, 15% of the traffic used to move at night. Now, facilities in Southern California have introduced off-peak shifts, resulting in 35% of the traffic now moving at night or at the weekend.<\/p>\n
That, in turn, has helped ease traffic congestion and spread the volume arriving at the gate over more hours, ” says McKenna referring the PierPass scheme.<\/p>\n
He also points out that there are no longer huge back-ups in trucks trying to enter the terminal, as the acquisition of vehicle and container numbers, in many cases, can be carried out while vehicles are on the move, hence they no longer need to slow down before entering terminals.<\/p>\n
ACKNOWLEDGING TECHNOLOGY BENEFITS Significantly, throughput in Southern California is expected to double within the next ten years, but this will only be possible if terminals become more automated. McKenna explains that union leaders are now publicly acknowledging that technology will play a vital role in making this happen.<\/p>\n
“Land is a finite resource in Southern California and on the West Coast in general, so terminals cannot simply expand to meet the demand. That means having to work more efficiently to handle growing volume, which in turn implies getting trucks in and out of the gate as fast as possible, stacking higher and introducing automated data collection.”<\/p>\n
Quizzed as to progress in terminals adopting automated gates, McKenna says that virtually all the major players have introduced optical character recognition (OCR) technology, achieving accuracy levels “into the high nineties”. The next step, he suggests, will be the introduction of either RFID or GPS-style tracking of assets. “In the near future, gate automation will become the norm on the West Coast. Eventually terminals will be able to handle 7,500 boxes per acre, as opposed to the figure of 4,000 boxes they are currently posting.”<\/p>\n
With regard to future gate developments, McKenna suggests that the logical next step would also be to introduce automatic scanning on the gate for exiting\/incoming containers. The government wants ID cards to be worn by everybody entering port facilities, including truck drivers. To do that efficiently, the implication is that automatic data collection of biometric data will eventually have to be introduced, too. “So, building security into the basic gate function makes real sense, ” concludes McKenna.<\/p>\n
SSA Containers president Ed DeNike notes: “SSA Marine is spending close to US$50m automating its four largest West Coast terminals, a process which began eighteen months ago. Although it is an awful lot of money, by our calculation, we can get a return in around three years, ” he says.<\/p>\n
The automation contract has been placed with WhereNet. DeNike stresses that, while price had been a factor, knowing that this essentially local company could get the job done and provide back-up support had also been hugely influential in convincing SSA Marine to place such a large investment with them.<\/p>\n
Nowadays, trucks drive through the company’s gate portals at speeds of up to 20mph, with both vehicle license plates and container numbers automatically logged by optical character readers (OCRs).<\/p>\n
This gives levels of accuracy into the ‘high eighties’, although DeNike is confident that 98%-99% can eventually be achieved.<\/p>\n
He explains that, while all West Coast container terminal operators are essentially moving in the same direction, different solutions are being adopted. In the case of SSA Marine, large portals, costing several thousand dollars a piece, have been adopted, being already operational at Terminal A and the Pacific Container Terminal at Long Beach. These have been preferred to wholly exposed installations because they provide a controlled environment and therefore help to ensure high levels of accuracy in information gathering. In addition, roller shutters mean they can be sealed overnight and therefore protected from unwanted interference.<\/p>\n
Significantly, automated gate systems are just the initial phase towards converting container handling at SSA Marine’s big box terminals into a much more streamlined process. This involves fitting RFID tags to all mobile equipment, whose position is therefore plotted in real time. In addition, OCRs and WhereNet readers are being applied to the quayside gantry cranes. As containers come ashore, they will be logged by the OCRs on the crane. This information is then sent to the Tideworks Mainsail terminal management system, which is also made aware of which terminal tractor is transporting the offloaded box to the yard via the crane’s WhereNet reader. The tractor is then tracked to the rendezvous point with the yard’s top loader, whose own tag allows Mainsail to track the box to the stack, where its final location is transmitted once the twistlocks have been released.<\/p>\n
“By using this fully automated process, we can eliminate a substantial percentage of the tally clerks in our terminals, ” explains DeNike.<\/p>\n
Even though only the gate portion of the overall automation process has so far been implemented by SSA Marine, the lack of queues of trucks at the gate has been the first very tangible benefit.<\/p>\n
However, the aim is now to equip each truck entering the terminal with its own RFID tag. This will enable Mainsail to identify each individual vehicle and therefore reduce the number of misidentifications on the gate. These are currently dealt with at the second stage gate process by a seated clerk who communicates with truckers through a microphone. Unlike at the portal, where camera positions are fixed, this clerk can manipulate a series of mobile cameras to get an accurate read of both the truck’s license plate and the container number, although DeNike claims a near perfect success rate in logging this latter number by the OCRs at the portal.<\/p>\n
Weighing of containers also takes place at this second stage processing point, with even this information gathered and entered automatically.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Following last months look at gate systems in the Philippines, France and Brazil, Alex Hughes now reports on a labour and technology revolution in the US.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":1307,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-1306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-container-cargo-handling"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1306"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=1306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}