Ports adapt to supply chain disruptions

Alain Berard says that in the face of continued disruption in the global supply chain, what the Port de Montréal needs is “EVI.”

“Not an electric vehicle. We needed visibility, elasticity, and investment, and that’s how we’ve been dealing with the disruptions.”

Berard, who is in charge of new business development and international affairs at the Port de Montréal, explained during the CITT’s Canada’s Logistics Conference that when it comes to elasticity, ports must be able to clear excess containers from loading and unloading areas quickly to avoid congestion when volumes go back up.

“We worked with our third-party storage partners in that area and we have a plan for when volumes spike so we can clearly decongest the yard and keep working efficiently,” he said.

In terms of visibility, Berard said ports need to be able to determine which containers take priority.

“Instead of having three or four or 5,000 containers, a comfortable number, you have 10,000 containers,” he said. “They’re not all the same priority. You have to figure out which ones need to exit the port quickly.”

The Port de Montréal invested in and developed an AI system called Cargo Two AI that helps prioritize urgent cargo, which Berard said came in handy during the pandemic.

Captain Allan Gray, president and CEO of the Halifax Port Authority, said although people may see recent supply chain disruptions as something new, they are not.

“I was at sea on container ships in the early ‘80s and these same sorts of disruptors existed in the early ‘80s,” said Gray. “So there hasn’t been a sudden change that we had a norm and we’ve gone to disruptors.”

Instead, Gray says there has been a closing of the capacity gap, with a lot of waste available across the supply chain.

“We could all be a little bit lax in what we did because we had capacity in the system that allowed us to be inefficient,” Gray said of times past. “And what we’re seeing now is those same disruptors that are kicking in the system, there isn’t this space anymore in the system to cope. And the first cry we hear out there is more capacity. We need to build more capacity.”

At the Port of Halifax, Gray said they are leaning more toward optimizing their current capacity.

“Pre-COVID, we were at 75 per cent on-time performance from shipping lines. Post-COVID, we’re at 23 per cent,” said Gray. “So that means berth that I used to operate at 75 per cent berth utilization, I now operate at 45 per cent. So the first cry is to build another $300 million berth rather than getting ourselves back to on-time performance.”

At the Port of Prince Rupert, Jeff Stromdahl, manager of trade development for the Prince Rupert Port Authority, said there has been heavy investment to improve the offerings at the port.

One of those investments included the expansion of DP World’s terminal during the pandemic, increasing capacity from 1.35 million TEUs to 1.6 million.

“The benefit of that timing was there was a lot of cargo that was being backed up inland,” said Stromdahl. “There was a tremendous amount of congestion that was backing it up all the way out to the ports. When we were able to bring that capacity online, quite literally the next day we filled up all of that physical space at the port, but it did help to build somewhat of a relief valve.”

The Prince Rupert Port Authority also invested in the Fairview-Ridley connector corridor, which Stromdahl said is a critical piece of infrastructure for the port’s overall intermodal ecosystem. The corridor is a private haul road from the terminal to Ridley Island, where the container examination facility and import/export facilities are located.

“This took our drayage down from approximately 21 kilometres roundtrip that went through the city on municipal roads, provincial roads, on the highway out to Ridley Island down to five-and-a-half kilometres,” said Stromdahl.