Promoting better box handling

“Over the last 50 years, productivity in terminals has improved tremendously. In part, that is down to better equipment, but software has played an absolutely crucial role. It used to be that doing 17-19 moves per hour meant you were really moving; nowadays, if you aren’t achieving 25-30 moves per hour, there is probably something wrong! The way we monitor productivity has absolutely changed; the two things go hand-in-hand.”

He cites as an example the ability to monitor mean times between component failure on cranes. By tracking these, a range of probability statistics can be generated that suggest to mechanics that some parts on a crane would benefit from additional maintenance, which in turn means they breakdown less often, allowing the crane to generate higher productivity levels.

He adds that a new generation of IT programme is being developed that will allow real time monitoring of even the biggest terminals, which will help managers pick up problems much faster and partially replace gut instinct in rapid decision making.