Sustainable Container Ports Development Case Study

Sustainable Container Ports Development - Case Study Example Certain ports may be handicapped due to obsolete machinery or being understaffed. In such cases, they find it hard to handle voluminous business, leading to backlogs. Such contingencies can damage business and lead to huge financial losses.‘The need to improve Terminal Efficiency was addressed amongst other things during the execution of the 5th EU sponsored 5th FWP project THERAPIST. Of particular interest was the contribution made in Work Package 4, the aim of developing â€Å"means† for gathering and intelligently using Data from Identified Sources. These â€Å"means† comprised of Object Oriented, Relational Database and Electronic Terminal Planning Board. Together they addressed very comprehensively, the bottleneck ‘Port’ described in the EC publication â€Å"COM99 317 en final Development of SSS in Europe†, 1999 (EC, 1999) , where shortcomings of port infrastructure and port inefficiency were commented upon and ‘port turn-a-round tim e’ was singled out as one of these inefficiencies. WP4 proposes â€Å"Means† aimed at increasing the efficiency of small to medium-sized ports by specifically increasing their commercial attractiveness to regional exporters and importers’ (Felix A Schmidt, Felix A Schmidt and Robert Young, 2005). This was a method thought to reduce the operational backlog and enhance coordination between different wings of the port.Situations like that of above and others wherein ports are too small to handle create extreme pressure on the exporter and port authorities. The government then takes up a feasibility study to modify or develop a new port/terminal to ease the pressure. China and India are two countries that have witnessed such a situation, due to their surplus volume of imports and exports. The major ports faced innumerable problems due to the high-density flow of bulk consignments, such as automobiles, heavy machinery, and food products and so on.