Phaeros

Harbour View was developed in the late 1990s and has continued to evolve since then; it is now being used in a number of ports in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, says Phaeros sales manager Tom de Smedt.

The most recent customer to go live with the Phaeros software was the liquefied natural gas port of Ras Laffan in Qatar.

“Rather than organising communication within a port as one-to-one communication (for example sending faxes between various parties), a port community system allows for all data to be stored centrally, where everyone with the right access rights can find information relevant to them,” says Mr de Smedt.

“This has, of course, a number of big advantages. Just to name a few: since data entry is done directly by the involved parties, there is no need to retype information into a system, the risk of errors is thereby drastically reduced, and there can be no discrepancies between information stored in separate systems.

“An additional advantage for everyone involved is, of course, that also any updates to information only need to be entered once and everyone involved will be able to see this. Previously, any change (for example in the vessel’s arrival time) had to be communicated to every party individually.”

Harbour View is also a port management system, allowing the port authority to use the provided information to take decisions, for example, on visit approvals and berth scheduling.