An essential part of any effective marine terminal is the tracking of goods that move through the facility. At low volumes, container tracking can be accomplished by a few people and an effective paper filing system.

Adding People

As the volume of containers moving through a marine terminal increases, additional personnel are added to maintain the paper filing system. As office personnel are added to the tracking effort, it eventually becomes physically impossible for enough personnel to access the paper system fast enough. The inventory tracking and reporting aspects of the marine terminal start to fail. The terminal manager that has this problem will not know how many containers are in the facility and truckers will show up at the gate to collect containers that no one can easily find.