Features

The Future of Automation By Sandy Smith Everywhere one turns, industries are facing automation. Robots, artificial intelligence, driverless vehicles. Ports will be changing as well. But as the next wave of technological revolution looms, ports are slowly looking at ways to automate — without getting too far ahead of the technology. “We look at some of the technology evolutions to ...

Port Cooperation: In the Name of Productivity By Lori Musser Fiercely competitive at most times, seaports have been known to mine each other’s cargo and passengers, tenants and terminal operators, and even employees. They do come together to learn and to share best practices in some functional areas, and to speak in unison to legislators and regulators. What they rarely ...

Strategy at Seaports Is Key to Handling Capacity Challenges By Candace Gibson On any given day, the hustle and bustle of a seaport is devoted to the purpose of bringing in vessels, loading and unloading cargo/passengers, provisioning the vehicle and getting those vessels back out to sea as quickly as possible. The premise sounds simple enough, but providing sufficient capacity ...

Thinking Outside the Box: Productivity at Non-Container Ports By Meredith Martino TEUs. It’s hard to have a discussion about port productivity without using the word. The short-hand description of containerized cargo is one of the measurements that denotes the size of a vessel or the cargo throughput of a port. Cross TEUs with time, and the metric becomes the default description ...

Latin America’s Proactive Approach Inventive Ideas Increase Non-Container Productivity By Tom Hranac In a region traditionally dependent on exporting commodities, depressed commodity prices, a stronger dollar and weaker global demand have caused an economic downturn in many parts of Latin America. Although it is not surprising that the region’s ports may have difficulties maintaining their non-containerized cargoes in these conditions, ...

Cruise Port Productivity: Upgrading Infrastructure for a Growing Industry By Steve Cutler The cruise industry is growing rapidly, adding new excursions with increasing frequency, building new ships with designs that make some terminals’ existing infrastructure obsolete, and launching mega-ships with incredible capacity. The challenge for cruise ports to become increasingly productive in order to capture their share of the expanding market ...

Each issue of AAPA Seaports Magazine is now available in an interactive digital edition. Read online, anytime! With the digital edition of AAPA Seaports Magazine, you can: • Navigate, magnify and bookmark pages with one click • View issues instantly from more smartphones • Read the issue online or download and print for later • Share articles on third-party news and social networking ...

Ports Strengthen Partnerships Via Community Outreach By Kathy A. Smith Ports are involving local communities in several ways that help educate and engage stakeholders. This involvement not only acts as a way to bridge ports to their communities, it can encourage acceptance, involvement and even partnerships. “How we achieve outreach is with open communication,” says Manuel Almira, executive director for ...

Community Outreach Toolbox Creating a dialog with the many communities surrounding a seaport takes broad shoulders. Once meaningful partnerships are established, port outreach programs are almost uniformly welcomed with open arms by interested neighbors. However, before achieving that level of engagement, ports are likely to encounter blank stares, self-interest or even hostility. Outreach initiatives that generate two-way communications take time ...

The Slippery Slope — Ethical Considerations in Port Business Decisions By Lori Musser Improving corporate behavior in a way that positively impacts the world is becoming everyone’s responsibility. Seaports with good corporate citizenship devote more time to the business at hand and spend less time in hot water. Recognizing that, port leaders are looking to ethics as a strategic resource ...