I think, in the past, it was very easy for a terminal operator if they wanted to
drive performance. They'd send a supervisor or somebody out in the yard to
push people to go faster. I think one thing terminal operators
really need to look at doing is figuring out how to harness technology and the
capabilities to drive performance, and so what that means is they're going to have
to start doing continuous improvement processes, analyzing data, looking for
ways to improve, and then making more systematic or systems-type changes to
actually drive that, that would be the first one. I think the the use of
technologies like the internet, better things like appointment systems data
sharing, is something that a modern terminal needs to do. And I'll
tell you one thing, that this is the industry I can pick up my phone and I
can look and see when you know my box from Amazon is gonna arrive at my
doorstep. I just moved to the UK and my container full of stuff is somewhere out
on the ocean and I have no idea where it is and when it's going to show up and
it's like everything I own, so what I'd really like to see is better visibility
across the container supply chain.
Collaboration is important on a number of levels and I think what you're going
to see is better collaboration across the entire container supply chain so
today there's some collaboration between like terminals and steamship companies,
you're going to see a lot more collaboration there and it's going to
drive better performance and we are seeing a lot more collaboration within
the terminal with the different departments in the terminal for
automated terminals because it's so important for IT and operations to work
together.
I think everybody is concerned about data sharing. If you look at what the
industry really needs to do to drive the next meaningful change in
performance, we need to share data and people honestly have to just become more
open. And, in terms of worrying about threats, I think that we're always gonna
have to worry about threats, we're in a new age now where you've got to protect
yourself to a certain degree, but you really need to figure out how to
collaborate better, how to share data because that will drive overall
performance improvements.
That's a hard one. I really love this industry and I've worked in it for a
long time now. I think that quicker adoption of new ways of working and new
technologies would be something I think could help us
drive performance. I think it's more openness for things like data sharing
would be two very obvious ones and one area that I think has been less
focused on is we've got to get better data sharing in the inland supply to the
side of the terminals. I think there's so much data you could bring from the
community into the terminal to make the community and terminals work so much
better together and we're just starting to tap that right now.
I think it's going to be the automation of currently manual equipment like
straddle carriers and RTGs, because there's going to be a big decrease, I
believe, in the number of greenfield automation projects. You're going to see
a big increase in customers looking to automate their brownfield projects and
there's going to be a bunch of technologies that are going to have to
come together to make those things really work.
I think what you're gonna see though is you're not gonna see a massive
change in anything. People are going to use AI techniques to make incremental
improvements to make optimization better, data collection, data cleansing better, so
if people think AI [artificial intelligence] is a silver bullet, I don't think it will be, but I do think
that applying the techniques of AI to the problems we're trying to solve will
allow us to solve them in a better way.