Data good for port relationship building

Speaking exclusively to Port Strategy at TOC Europe, Mr Jensen said that in the ports and terminals industry, data can be used to help with exception handling and to predict when things are likely to go wrong.

“When things go wrong — and we know that they do go wrong at times — what is then the best course of action?” he asked.

“What is the information we need to inform our own staff, and more importantly to inform our customers, on what … our Plan B is and what … we are doing going forwards?

“There’s a fantastic opportunity here to not just reduce the cost of exception handling, but also to build relationships — being able to show our customers that when things go wrong, we know what to do. That builds on the human aspect.”

Other potentials

In response to a question about whether the ports and terminals sector is making the most of the digitalisation and automation options open to it, the chief executive said that currently, no one knows what the future industry standards — for both technology and business processes — will be.

“What we are seeing now is a very mixed landscape of a lot of technology and a lot of processes being re-engineered from the perspective of ‘Let’s try, let’s see what works best’,” he said.

“It’s not because it’s trial and error as such — it’s because at the end of the day, the winning tech and winning processes are the ones that show themselves out in the marketplace to be commercially superior, and that requires testing.

“That’s exactly the phase we are in right now.”