High berth productivity - what’s the point?

The question was asked by UK-based port consultant Budha Majumdar, speaking at this week’s Portcentric Logistics conference in Manchester, organised by Navigate Events.

Majumdar takes the view that the most wasteful activities in container terminals are truck waiting times (queues, unproductive box shuffling, “lost” boxes) and - signalling a sea change in conventional thinking about terminal efficiency - “overproductive” berths.

“I am not saying it is wrong to have an average of five cranes each averaging 30 moves an hour over an 8000 TEU ship," said Majumdar, "but we need to be sure it is really needed when the ship is operating on a super slow speed schedule.

“A shipping line might say that it needs fast turnaround in order to maintain the integrity of the slow speed schedule, but let’s at least discuss it with them.”

Apart from the energy cost on the quay, the quicker the ship’s moves are exchanged the more likely are errors in the buffer stocks and that aggravates the problems of unproductive shuffling and “lost” boxes in the yard, leading to excess use of handling equipment, wasteful truck queues, etc.

Majumdar suggested that it may be appropriate for a terminal to have, say, a three crane availability standard guaranteed at 25 moves/crane hour.

If the customer wants more, he pays for it. If, on the other hand, the terminal operator needs to hurry the ship through, he pays for it.

Analysts estimate that slow speed scheduling, aimed at fuel savings and reducing overcapacity, has added 5-7 days to east-west supply chains.

The fuel savings are huge. Lloyd’s Register (LR) has estimated that for a large container ship at 70,000 kW main engine power, reducing speed from 25 to 20 knots (20% slower) would require just 50% power. Allowing for the longer voyage time, the fuel saving would be around 40%.

From a technical standpoint, LR also warned that operating ships for long periods outside their “design envelope” could be piling up problems for the machinery.

All the same, slow steaming looks set to stay for some time, even though container trades are recovering. Speaking last December Jesper Kjaedegaard, a former Maersk CEO and the current president of the International Chamber of Shipping, forecast that overcapacity would last until 2013, despite all the vessel lay-ups and slow speed regimes.

In this context, Majumdar’s case could be very important, particularly in the overall supply chain context: what counts is the speed the box moves through the terminal, not how fast it comes off the ship.

Source :World Cargo News