An industry balancing act: Mv-Fleet enables lines to work together in filling empty containers and minimising trade imbalances
Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 6:36PM Necessity has long been considered the mother of invention and, in difficult times, containerlines are desperately looking for solutions to solve the notable inefficiencies in the industry.
Globalisation, with all its benefits, has brought with it huge challenges – none more so for the container industry than balancing the significant imbalances in global trade.“On average a container remains empty for over 56% of its lifetime,” says Harm Jansen, chief executive of Container Consultants & Systems, the Panama-based company dedicated to providing its partners with important cost-saving tools.“The opportunity for cost reduction is huge. For instance, saving 10 moves per day means a saving of around $1m per year,” he says.
Its Mv-Fleet project acts as a single and common planning platform for a growing group of container operating companies.The pilot testing period of the service allowed optimisation that resulted in a reduction of $200,000 a month for each of the lines involved.
Some 20% of all container shipments are empty containers, says Mr Jansen, who set up in Panama to be at the heart of more than 150 trade lanes and to take advantage of incentives offered by the Panamanian government to technology firms.
Operating from the City of Knowledge close to the Miraflores locks of the Panama Canal, the company has started to plug more clients into the powerful combination of Panama’s electronic as well as maritime connectivity.
It is in the planning departments of the major lines where costs can be drastically reduced, he says.“We also offer the opportunity that from now this area of the company can also deliver revenues to shipping lines,” says Mr Jansen.
“Look at how 95% of global container shipping lines do their empty container repositioning work. Operations departments spend hours planning routes and, after changes in real the world, they take extra time fixing those plans and solving the problems that arise from lack of vessel space, expensive moves and timing issues among others,” he says.
Mv-Fleet, he says, does not require a change in procedures other than providing information gathered in the company’s daily business to feed the Mv-Fleet system.
“The system does not change the way they work, it is only needed to feed the system with everyday data and the system processes the data through our algorithms. This shows in advance where there are going to be problems,” he says.
Solutions
Once problems have been identified the group offers solutions where lines can share equipment.
By reducing the number of empty moves, the system not only helps reduce costs but also limits the industry’s carbon footprint.
“When container rotation is improved, carbon emissions are reduced,” says Mr Jansen. But beyond that it is difficult to quantify the impact that these measures can have in environmental terms.
“Our company is working together with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Transportation & Logistics to develop such measuring methodology based on the current algorithms of Mv-Fleet,” he concludes.
