Smiths detection is a world-leading provider of
X-ray, chemical detection, narcotics detection
and explosives detection equipment. We are installed across the world airports
across the worlds ports
and with security and policing and military around the world.
Smiths Detection has been providing equipment to the ports industry for many years now
we provide everything from large cargo scanners
that will X-ray an entire container all the way through to
hand-held trace equipment that will
allow you to identify narcotics or explosives and also radiological
hand-held equipment that will allow you to
identify radioactive materials and chemical
and toxic chemicals as well. Our equipment is used by many different
agencies; it often depends on the country but it's often police forces,
customs agencies,
all the way through to security and private security companies and private
companies as well
protecting their own premises and also scanning their own goods
coming in and out of their premises as well. Manual inspection of
containers can take a considerable amount of time. Containers can be very
large, they can be very varied in the goods they carry
so an X-ray inspection can be very quickly
done can take several minutes; it can give you an idea of the exact
goods that are in the container; it can give you an idea whether there's
organic, non organic compounds
some of our computer algorithms can also search for cigarettes, they can search for
narcotics
weapons and even obviously people which is a
recurring problem with people trafficking and smuggling as well
so it's a lot quicker, it speeds up the process a lot quicker in the ports.
I would say one of the biggest challenges the industry faces
is really how you get the operator
to scan as many
containers as they can, often the limiting factor is the operator
and the number of operators you have so we're now working on ways of centralising
data
so that it allows you a central operator facility
where you can scan either multiple facilities at once all into one
operations room or just from a very large port
into one operations room so you can get the best out of your operators
to get the highest throughput of containers. The best example is probably
the work we've done with El Salvador in Customs.
They have the challenge that they wanted 24-hour-a-day seven-day-a-week
coverage of all the containers going in and out of the country in a sea port
some land ports and the airport the International Airport. We provided them
with a system
that allows them to remotely monitor all of this traffic and they have a
considerable problem with corruption
in the country so they wanted a centralised hub whereby they could
authorise or hold goods coming in and out
all of that network is secure and it's all managed and
scanned by our equipment, it's been very successful of late.
All shipping companies are obsessed with speed and quite rightly they want
to get their
goods and services through the ports as quickly as possible.
Consequently we are creating solutions for them
that will allow the fastest scanning of containers
also will allow as I said if you centralise
the scanning operations you get higher throughput and high utilisation of each
operator
we also provide automatic threat recognition software
it will highlight any areas that the computer-base highlights as a
threat the operators looking for
and these can be preset to look at things depending on what the customs
they see as a threat in that environment, be it
cigarette smuggling, weapons people, narcotics explosives
and that has a considerable improvement efficiency in the port area.
One of the key things is actually the storage of data
A lot of times the customs officials are
using our equipment to check what's in a container against the manifest for that
container. They often want to store that for a long time to allow access to other
periods either for evidence if there's a prosecution later
or just to check general manifest data.
We have now created a data management system
that will allow both localised and remote
access to all of this data and allow it to be stored for a long period of time
and that is a great benefit to the customs and the ports officials
in generally speeding up throughput and efficiency as well. Each customer has
different requirements and we can
adapt the system. One of the key things about our
systems as opposed to a lot of our competitors is we
develop our scanning systems to allow them to be upgradeable over time
to find different threats and to allow the customer
to upgrade them once they have them installed as well so that they
can always adapt to a changing environment.
I think that has great advantages to the customers, it increases their efficiency,
it also could allow them to reduce costs which is very important to them
and it allows them to back up data as I said and
handle data remotely which to a lot of them is extremely attractive,
especially when they have multiple ports to deal with in relatively small
countries.