TJ Rucker pointed out that the massive financial investment involved in automation means that it\u2019s not always suitable for terminals once a return on investment (RO) assessment is carried out as most terminals don\u2019t have the spare cash for large projects readily available.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cThere are some instances where operating in a traditional environment is actually faster than automating. So, some companies have made the decision not to invest in automation just for the sake of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Weighing up<\/strong><\/p>\n If a terminal has a lot of land, its traditional operation is efficient enough and volumes are not expected to grow beyond its footprint \u201cthen it doesn\u2019t make sense to automate,\u201d said Mr Rucker.<\/p>\n If a terminal does decide that automation is worthwhile pursuing, then it needs to look at all the options on the market. For instance, depending on where it is geographically, it can decide to partner with a company with a local presence. \u201cThis will drive decisions on vendor choice,\u201d he stressed, adding \u201cyou\u2019re also somewhat beholden to the equipment type you have, your terminal operating system and vendors you have selected in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite Mr Rucker\u2019s warning to exercise caution in deciding whether automation is the right thing to do, he stated that volume is key for terminals and automating a terminal is \u201ca capacity play.\u201d He added, however, that productivity will only take a terminal so far. \u201cYou can be a fraction more efficient than your neighbour and you\u2019re going to make the same amount of money because terminals have become so heavily commoditised that investing too much technology into raising your productivity doesn\u2019t generate the same money anymore.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s so much downward pressure on the rates because of this (shipping) alliance creation. 15 years ago, if you did 34 moves an hour rather than 32 you were very much a differentiated terminal \u2013 that\u2019s not the case anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It doesn\u2019t always make sense to automate and the feasibility of automation depends on available investment and previous technology and equipment choices, the president of Tideworks Technology has said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":210,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-container-cargo-handling"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":211,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions\/211"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}