Efficiencies within Container Booking and Scheduling
Effective Planning
What is an effective plan?
- Stack is known in advance and never moves.
- Exporter books container in good time for best plans to be put in place.
- Ship’s planners, PPECB, transporters, and cold stores are all coordinated.
- Between all parties, nothing changes or goes wrong.
Just imagine how the cost of the supply chain would reduce!
FACT: THINGS CHANGE!
- Must know what is happening to ships and ports (schedule integrity, ETA amendments).
- Understand shipping schedules.
- Through experience, must pre-empt what could happen.
- Plan, plan, and re-plan again.
- Everyone must be as accommodating as possible.
- Efficiency remains a dream, or not?
The Ideal Plan
Many aspects are involved in the logistics process, but simplified it can be summed up as:
Day 1
- Exporter receives stock status reports from all load points at the end of the day’s activities.
Day 2
- 10:00: All bookings for the following day are supplied by the Exporter to the LSP.
- 11:00: Booking reference numbers received from shipping lines.
- 11:00–12:00: Liaise with load points and transport companies regarding optimal scheduling.
- End of day: Load point confirms dispatches of the day (mates) and supplies updated stock sheet to Exporter/LSP.
- 12:00: Confirmed plan is sent to both load points and transporters.
- 14:00: Load point receives loading instructions from Exporter/LSP.
Day 3
- 08:00: Transporter confirms status of empty collections and requested load schedule.
- 12:00: Transporter updates on status of day’s activities.
- 16:00: Transporter updates on status of day’s activities.
Exporter Demands
Exporters have to work under extreme pressure and heavy demands from both their clients and orchards. The exporter expects the same high level of service and reliability from their logistics service provider.
The logistics service provider must:
- Understand that each exporter is unique in their approach to business.
- Make sure the exporter’s business is clearly understood and defined.
- Give proactive advice and support where possible.
- Always act in the interest of the exporter.
- Protect the quality of the fruit at all times.
- Be available at all times.
In general, the more professional the exporter, the more realistic their demands.
Exporters and logistics service providers with a joint venture or teamwork mentality allow for greater efficiencies and quicker response times.
Communication
Communicating in the right way is important.
Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information.
- Through effective communication comes great cooperation.
- Successful communication between all parties results in the most efficient and cost-effective options being taken.
- Unsuccessful communication = Costs.
The parties: Shipping line, container depot, the port, transporter, load point, PPECB, and the exporter.
- Effective communication creates the desire to cooperate.
- Without effective communication, the results can be any or all of the following:
- Increased workload
- High frustration levels
- Parties in the chain becoming uncooperative
- Additional costs
- Product quality coming under threat
- Breakdown in relationships
- Companies running out of favours to ask
Challenges of Short Notice Changes
Short notice changes can result in potential additional costs, due to:
- Futile trips
- Plug-in or lift cost
- Staff cost (additional staff)
- Overtime cost
- Risk of errors
Understandable/acceptable short notice changes:
- Windbound situations
- Fruit not on temperature due to unexpected power failure
- Unexpected breakdown (usually isolated and involves small volumes)
Unacceptable changes:
- Everything else
More accountability is required to alleviate unacceptable short notice changes.
How to address this remains a challenge.
In Closing
Being a developing country, with a lack of competition in our ports—which make up an important part of our export chain—we will probably have to contend with inefficiencies for some time.
In the rest of the export chain, competition is such that any party involved who does not perform at a very high standard will not survive going forward.
The export supply chain remains heavily reliant on teamwork, but each company involved must be clear in their objectives, goals, and responsibilities to allow efficiencies.
Each one in the chain is just as good as their last action.
A lot can still be done to achieve the objective of a very efficient export chain, and aspiring on a daily basis to do better today than yesterday must produce the necessary results.