Ever visited a container terminal and watched the lashing teams having hour-long breaks waiting for next bay to be ready for them to do their job? The real reason might be that lashing teams are assigned in a hierachical manner, limiting their lashing assignments to neighbouring bays in accordance with a specific quay crane's work during a port stay.

Now the solution to break this dependancy is here: The ARL Lashing Planner, planning for high utilisation of lashing teams across not only all bays on a vessel, but all vessels alongside at berth. Read more here.

In later shipZine editions, learn about the safety aspect of lashing planning: Plan to avoid work in unsafe zone & times onboard the vessel.

Most of the developed world is struggling to emerge from the grip of recession. This is in stark contrast to the economies of the developing world, who are exhibiting impressive rates of growth. It is probably going to be some time before the economies in Europe and elsewhere are able to sustain significant growth. This means that businesses are having to reset expectations as to what ‘business as usual’ actually means.

Over the past few years, the terms low cost, value and service have become the norm when describing the kinds of products and services that people are buying. The downturn has forced every business to focus only on the things that are essential for their operations. At the same time, the lack of funding has reduced budgets encouraging the ‘do more with less’ attitude. It is therefore no surprise that those companies who are able to provide great service at low cost are the ones doing well.

At OnOnShipping, we view this environment as the new normal and our goal is to be able to provide our customers with the best service at the lowest cost. To do this we are exploiting technology in innovative ways and also looking at how we can build the organisation in order to have the lowest operating costs. With all of these efforts, our primary yardstick is customer value and customer satisfaction. If we do this, we should be able to meet our goal of lowest rates combined with great service. This approach is not new and is best illustrated by low cost airlines such as Easyjet in the UK and Southwest in the United States. The success of these has prompted a wave of similar companies across the world. However, there is no equivalent in the maritime arena and we think it’s time that this changed. OnOn Shipping is the result.

Low cost airlines entered the European airspace in 1991 when Ireland's Ryan Air commenced their operations. Later easyJet followed in 1995 and from 2000 a similar trend started in Asia. Aside from the leaders of the low cost airlines being financially successful in a tight market, they differentiate themselves from traditional airlines by a number of factors:

During a series of articles, we will explore a number of these differences -those facilitated by IT technology- and draw parallels to how the cargo industry is currently operating and may operate in the future.

During recent years ARL Consulting have completed several projects incorporating complex mathematical models as an integral part of the solution provided. This is in response to the continously increasing unit counts in shipping and transport, like growing size of vessels, number of transports, number of hub-and-spoke connection opportunities, which makes it harder and harder to identify and evaluate multiple options by human force only.

In a series of shipZine articles three business challenges in the transport industry, which has been successfully resolved by applying scientific approaches, will be explored:

1. selection of optimal container vessel berthing at quay side
2. evaluation of relevant vessel deployment opportunities
3. vessel bunker consumption calculation

Each of the business scenarios provide benefits for the transportation organisation: 

1) selection of optimal container vessel berthing reduce the mileage required by the yard equipment for servicing the vessel; this results in direct fuel savings, time savings for equipment drivers, reduces wear-and-tear and allow for servicing of more vessels with the same amount of equipment and staff. 

2) evaluation of relevant vessel deployment opportunities provides the deployment planners with the ability to consider feasible and relevant network and deployment scenarios, which can be assessed from an operational and commercial perspective, not only saving time with the planners, but highlighting deployment scenarios, with benefical cost and income opportunities, which otherwise would not have been considered due to the complexity of the many opportunities.

3) vessel bunker consumption calculation give the direct benefit of reduced bunkers costs.

brute force - Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing:

<programming> A primitive programming style in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive methods suited to small problems directly to large ones. The term can also be used in reference to programming style: brute-force programs are written in a heavy-handed, tedious way, full of repetition and devoid of any elegance or useful abstraction

The mathemathical approaches used are all 'intelligent' alternatives to clean brute-force approach and reflect in some form that the computer system act as a human thinking brain -just much faster and more comprehensive.

Many other areas for harvesting benefit by using math force, like container vessel stowage planning, exist in the transport industry.