Unlocking port performance: rethinking capability, infrastructure and towage operations
As CEO of international towage and marine services company Svitzer, Kasper Friis Nilaus has identified opportunities to improve performance at many ports where the company operates. In this podcast, he shares his ideas for achieving greater efficiency
Waste and inefficiency at ports worldwide is frustrating for ports, shipping lines and service providers, as constraints impact supply chains. Svitzer sees its tugs and crews operating ineffectively because of uncoordinated management. but its CEO says these problems can be overcome
PORTS face a wide spectrum of potential constraints that impact on how they operate, believes Kasper Friis Nilaus, CEO of the international towage and marine services company Svitzer, and in this podcast he sets out a proposal for how these inefficiencies can be addressed.
Many of those impacts have natural causes — climate change, for example, which leads to increased weather closures because of wind and storms, and a port’s geography could limit its ability to expand as it may wish.
Others arise from the effects of evolving trade, with the growth of the world’s commercial fleet outpacing port capacity increases, Nilaus says. This has led to higher container congestion currently than was seen during the pandemic, when queues of ships were widely reported as they waited to berth.
In addition, vessel designs themselves are evolving, with larger ships requiring deeper channels while their greater size creates greater windage. Both these developments require the right tugs to handle these ships as they approach and leave their berths, he says.
In this podcast, he discusses existing solutions to these problems, including investments in infrastructure, such as cranes and hinterland developments, but Svitzer’s experience has led him to believe that solutions need to be as much organisational as physical.
As an example, Nilaus describes a situation in which his tugs were inefficiently deployed to assist a ship depart from its berth before it was ready, wasting not only time on that call-out, but with knock-on impacts on later vessel moves and thus on the port’s entire operations.
He presents a solution that he has seen successfully implemented at one leading European port, where it has improved coordination and efficiency across that port’s activities.
He explains how data sharing and cooperation between the port actors can be encouraged as part of the solution, backed up by improved towage capabilities, which he believes can play a large part in improving performance at many ports.
In the podcast he describes the impacts that the first three of Svitzer’s latest TRAnsverse tugs are having in two large ports, saying that effective towage management can extend a port’s operational capability without significant capital expenditure.
“Waste accumulates and sometimes become exponential. To solve that, you need to be able to take better decisions, taking into account the whole ecosystem in a port,” Nilaus tells his listeners.