The recent Suez Canal blockage has thrown this into stark relief as vessel schedules have been completely broken by the “Ever Given” making it impassable. Not all shipping uses the canal, but the significance of this weeks’ events will be felt globally as schedules and plans are thrown into disarray with products and infrastructure ending up in the wrong place or just late.
Tools such as Marine Terminal Optimization go some way to mitigate the impact of these sudden changes through the use of applied modelling algorithms which, when integrated properly within your IT infrastructure, allow for the rapid sharing of information and reflect the impact of decisions on the infrastructure as a whole.
Integrating the jetty with the rest of the facility means that as decisions are made or as changes occur, all parts of the organization are able to make better and more informed decisions using real data. Traditional, more manual systems which are updated, at best twice a day, lack the ability to communicate change quickly enough and lead to higher costs, lower efficiency and worse decisions which may take weeks to unwind and cause significant problems through increased demurrage, waiting times and worse customer service.
Integrating the jetty scheduling process with your wider port operations delivers benefits to the whole organization. It allows you to reflect the impact of sudden and unexpected changes quickly and accurately across the whole organization. In this way, you minimize the impact on your clients through active scheduling to maintain the organization KPI's.
In cases where the refinery drives the schedule, closer integration between the jetty and the refinery delivers better decisions and shows the stakeholders the impact those decisions will have on the refinery schedule. This is particularly the case if simulation and "what if" scenarios are generated to test the likely outcomes of different decisions and show the operations team the impact of their decisions.
Of course, once decisions are made, these are easily communicated across the whole facility, ensuring everyone is up to speed and working with the latest information. The power of MES is to integrate the jetty with all aspects on operations including the trading desks - their responsiveness can be key in keeping the refinery functioning and being able to look into operations at the jetty level provides a clearer window through which better decisions can be made.
