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New Features Focus on Further Reducing Demurrage and Improving Communications and Reporting
Cirrus Logistics, the creator of SEABERTH, which was developed to meet the needs of port operators and those involved in planning complex ship movements across the world, has just announced a raft of enhancements to the system. The new features focus on further reducing demurrage and improving communications and reporting, and reflect customer priorities as well as Cirrus’s own experience of using the tool over recent months.
A prime objective for SEABERTH’s developers has been to enable users to achieve higher throughput in their berths. To this end, they have introduced an intensive re-plan option to focus on a small number of specified vessels and, as a result, deliver an increased number of optimisation options. They have also advanced the algorithm so that it may be configured to automatically search for and attempt to close gaps in the schedule following a re-plan, taking into account the availability of berths, ships and resources.
Clarity in communications has always been a mantra of the SEABERTH team and now there are a number of improvements to the displays enabling users to see at a glance when they are going to have particularly busy days across the entire future plan and where they might have shortages of vital resources. SEABERTH has also become even more flexible in permitting planners, using their knowledge and experience, to fix direction and resources separately from fixing berths; or they may prefer to leave the system to recommend the best berth and time-in schedule. In addition, there is more flexibility in reporting with the introduction of new types of reports and options for categorising information.
A significant development is the provision of "Analysis Groups" – an adaptable and strategic tool that helps planners to identify performance issues or opportunities in the port . They deliver the means to divide large numbers of vessels into smaller, different groups according to certain criteria. Planners can then both analyse the historic information according to these criteria and also run a series of simulations using this data to test possible "what if?" scenarios. The benefit of this is considerable, allowing users to establish exactly where the issues are in relation to a specific group and helping them devise a strategy for the future. The groups can also be used in Key Performance Indicators (KPI) reporting and the easy-to-understand graphical interface, together with the new facility to copy data onto the clipboard for sharing with others, means the results are readily communicated to all the stakeholders.
Customers of SEABERTH include: Chevron, Ras Laffan Terminal Operations, RasGas, QatarGas, APT, MiRO, ExxonMobil and Total
"As always, our goal has been to deliver sophisticated technology in an easy-to-use accessible tool," says Julia Race of Cirrus Logistics. "The algorithms suggest solutions but it is the planner who remains in control. For all these reasons, SEABERTH is now a terminal management tool of choice for those involved in planning complex ship movements across the globe."
