The Paper System Overloads

As the volume of containers moving through a marine terminal increases, additional personnel are added to maintain the paper system. As people are added to the tracking effort, eventually it becomes physically impossible for everyone to access the yard board model and move the representations of the containers fast enough to maintain accuracy [see Figure 2]. Marine terminals with a failed inventory system will:

• not accurately know how many containers are in the facility.
• deliver an empty container that when opened is not really empty.
• have truckers waiting in line for hours to pick up containers that cannot be easily located.
• have vessels, along with the work gangs, idly standing by while the last few containers are being located.

Some marine terminals can postpone this effect, chiefly by segregating berths, gate lanes and consequently the yard board model to a particular vessel service. However, in a successful terminal, the handling volume catches up and eventually all of these efforts fail.

When to Computerize

With foresight, a computer system can be installed before the paper inventory system fails. If none of the problems mentioned have appeared, then the decision to computerize is a simple economic one. The comparison is made between the number of people that would be eliminated if the computer is installed and the cost of the computer system. A valid comparison cannot be done in this paper because the cost of people varies from facility to facility.

Usually these comparisons include a 3 to 5 year time frame extending from the present into the future. Due to labor agreements or hiring practices, the most important factor for terminal management is generally the dramatic reduction in additional new hires over that 3 to 5 year time frame.