Beware fiddling your container load declarations

 Taiwanese container shipping line, Wan Hai Lines, has announced large fines and other costs for shippers whose container load declarations are inaccurate, as part of a crackdown on maritime crime that has bedevilled the industry for decades. For hazardous cargo the fine will be $30,000 per container and $20,000 for non hazardous. 

Container load discrepancies are widespread, despite an IMO compromise in 2013 on making weighing containers mandatory, a watering down that infuriated various governments and interested marine bodies . The beaching of the MSC Napoli container ship off the Devon coast in 2007 showed the breathtaking scale of fraud involved that also imperils ships, seamen road safety and the environment. Britain's Marine Accident Investigation Branch found that 20% of all deck containers on board the ill-fated ship were three tonnes heavier than their declared weights and in one case was 20 tonnes. 

Such discrepancies may have been partly due to many packers and shippers not having the facilities to weigh containers at their premises but the incentive to fiddle is huge. By deliberately under declaring container load weights shippers can minimise import taxes calculated on cargo weight, but it also allows overloaded containers to keep declared weights within limits imposed by road and rail transportation. Container shipping lines are also swindled. Other container lines will doubtless follow suit so shippers and packers should treat this as a warning shot across the bows.  

The ill-fated container ship, Napoli, beached on a Devon coast after a storm that exposed arguably shipping's greatest fraud.

Innovation on Sany's reach stackers yield one-year payback

 It is rare to find innovation giving costs and environmental advantages that repay the initial investment within one year yet that is what Sany has done with its energy recovery system (ERS) on its H9 20ft and 40ft container handling reach stackers.

Sany uses ERS that has been around for 20 years but only recently has it used the technology on its reach stackers, ostensibly the first and only to do so. Unlike many reach stackers it uses four cylinders for lifting and lowering, two of which are placed behind the driver's cab. These rear cylinders use the downward gravitational forces to charge nitrogen accumulators which in turn provide extra power over and above the available engine power for the next lift. The result is that theH9 stackers give more than 50% fuel savings over an identical machine without the ERS. Competitors use another system called flow drive transmissions with smaller engines but achievable fuel savings are only 25%.

How, though, do the investment figures stack up to justify the extra £25,000 to £30,000 for fitting the ERS? First consider the impact of the UK's abolition of red diesel for off road vehicles on April 1st this year. The lower duty on red diesel was only 11.14p per litre compared with the full duty rate of 57.9p for regular diesel, a huge difference. Now let's assume that a £380,000 yard reach stacker consumes 20 litres of diesel per hour. The ERS technology consumes only 9 litres of fuel per hour. Assuming a saving of 11 litres at £1.20 per litre and 2,000 hours work a year that equates to a saving of £26,000 every year, hence the one-year payback. 

Not to be left out of the advantages is the environmental one that means far less exposure to diesel fumes and a cleaner, greener atmosphere. David Cooper, MD of Cooper Specialised Handling, the sole UK importer of Sany lift trucks, claims the H9 technology is the most radical change in reach stackers in the last 20 years. The technology certainly bears consideration.

A Sany H9 container handling reach stacker with the fitted ERS system for cutting fuel costs by over 50%

 

 

In praise of articulated forklifts

When first launched in Britain in the 1980s* the articulated forklift was derided by the competition as a Heath Robinson contraption that would go nowhere. Today it has found universal acceptance through the dramatic transformation of warehouse economics but is there still market reticence and ignorance of such trucks' full potential?

One hears a great deal about how space efficient the artics are over the conventional counterbalanced and reach trucks and understandably so because saved space can have knock-on benefits of reduced rates, rents, heating, transport costs, etc but is there much more to it than that? Yes, a great deal more. 

Take, for example, the artics' flexibility which leads to big productive gains, especially when they are fitted with RDTs. Such add-ons allow them to unload lorries in yards, where reach trucks are not really suitable, to deliver pallets directly into racking, and directed by the WMS then go straight to extract a pallet load for delivery to a waiting lorry. This can sharply reduce forklift fleet sizes and maintenance costs. 

I mentioned transport cost reductions as an advantage. This can be considerable when artics eliminate satellite warehouses through their space savings and the transport costs of running between them and a main warehouse which could be part of a production facility. 

So next time when strapped for storage space why not consider the artics as the answer to your prayers? UK suppliers of the artics are Translift Bendi, Flexi Narrow Aisle, Combilift and Mima (Wilmat Handling)

*The functionally limited Towmotor of the 1960s excluded.  

An articulated forklift shows the incredible 

space savings over a cb truck (up to 50%) and 

up to 30% over a reach truck 

Will Ukraine crisis cripple global logistics?

 Politics can disrupt logistics big time and so all logisticians should be concerned over the political crisis enveloping the Ukraine and making contingency plans accordingly. How events will turn out is unclear but is there something of double standards at work and a sense of deja vu, at least in part which hopefully will concentrate minds before it is too late?

Russia has genuine security concerns about the Ukraine becoming a NATO member, which if enacted would allow NATO in certain circumstances to park nuclear weapons on Russia's doorstep. If NATO is encouraging the Ukraine to join them that would be irresponsible because NATO does not need the Ukraine as a member, other than its ostensible desire to encircle and contain Russia as much as possible. So what do I mean by double standards and a perilous deja vu possibility?

In 1962 the Cuban missile crisis brought humanity to the brink of a nuclear third world war. Cuba, a sovereign country on America's doorstep, had allowed Russia to install nuclear-capable missiles but America, invoking its own Monroe doctrine, used force of arms to stop Russian freighters at sea. Evidently, it was acceptable for America to have a Monroe Doctrine excuse but not for any other countries expressing genuine, similar security concerns, hence the double standards at work and sense of deja vu. 

One possibility for a solution is that if the Ukraine became a NATO member then NATO should give an unconditional guarantee that no nuclear weapons and their delivery systems would be placed on its soil. The NATO camp should also not forget the huge debt the free world owes Russia for its appallingly high sacrifices to rid the world of its worst political scourge, namely Nazi tyranny. 

                                          Russian tanks ostensibly massing on Ukraine's border

Real culprits in UK lorry driver shortages

 Logistics has long been the poor relation of Britain's economy and despite all the breast beating by interested parties not much has changed but who are the real culprits who have given the industry a reputation for low pay, which is a key driver for workplace shortages?

Right now there is a clutch of problems plaguing global logistics but many of these, like the chaos surrounding container shortages and long shipping delays, are short-term. Years before Brexit and Covid 19 the seismic change in the way we all shop exposed the perennial problem of driver shortages, currently estimated at 60,000 in Britain. The ingredients of this shortage were low pay, long unsocial hours, dreadful roadside facilities for drivers to wash, eat and feel secure in their parking compounds, all experiences unknown on the Continent where drivers are treated with more respect.

The factors that led to this parlous state ultimately lie at the door of manufacturers and retailers whose obsession with maintaining good profit margins was at the expense of the 3PLs' margins which were often wafer thin, causing bankruptcies. This is important because much of Britain's goods movement is done by 3PLs often locked into 5-year contracts where they have little room for manoeuvre when their costs rise. In short the 3PLs were screwed long term by their clients and were helped in this by their exploitation of cheaper, foreign drivers.

It has been aired that the labour shortages are being blamed for distress in other areas outside logistics, like in food production, and here the post Brexit return of EU nationals, including drivers to their native countries, is blamed. Such distress, however, is short-term and can be addressed by a mixture of automation and better pay and conditions. In the broccoli picking fields of England, for example, a robo veg picker has been successfully trialled and while costing £400,000 it can replace seven human pickers who can earn up to £30 an hour and such robots are likely to fall in cost when economies of scale improve. 

So if we see driver and warehouse operators' incomes rise would the downside by significant inflation? This is a difficult one to call but we should remember that logistics (distribution and storage) forms less than 10% of a product's retail price and when the current, transitory logistics upheavals have normalised it should not be too worrisome. Meanwhile some mea culpa would be in order by the ultimate culprits, namely manufacturers and retailers, who are hoist by their own petard.

More respect for drivers would see less of this

Britain's first electric general cargo port crane proves 'green' economics

 As a UK general cargo port Ipswich may not be big league but it surely ranks with the best when proving the case for 'green' port economics. Ports going fully electric when handling container movements, particularly on mainland Europe, have been around for over a decade but when handling a wide range of general cargoes they are much scarcer but the owners of Ipswich, Associated British Ports, saw not only the business case for going all electric with their cranes but also listened to their customer's desires.

Hitherto, Ipswich, which handles over two millions tonnes of general cargo a year, worth over £600 million, making it the biggest export port for agricultural products, relied on a Mantsinen 95R diesel crane. Its two new, free-ranging cranes on order, the 95RE, part of a £4 million investment, are due to begin service next year and are believed by Cooper Specialised Handling, Mantsinen's UK partner in the supply contract, to be the first fully mains electric powered hydraulic cranes in a general UK port application. What's more they have been configured around the idiosyncrasies on the quays of the Orwell river. 

The new models, for example, will benefit from a 4mt centre undercarriage, some 2.5mt narrower than the standard crane yet does not compromise operational speed. They will be capable of handling over 500 tonnes an hour and its Insight telematics system will work out the cost per tonne moved. 

So what of the economic case? ABP has already reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 35% at Ipswich since 2014 and its latest investment will mean all its cargo handling operations will be fully electrified within five years, much reducing its CO2 emissions and noise. This is helped by the existing 4,000 solar panels which will generate enough energy for the two new cranes. Its investment in an electricity sub station infrastructure will future-proof it to accommodate up to four electric cranes working concurrently on the same quay. ABP, which plans to decarbonise all its ports, estimates the electric cranes will save over 40% in energy costs and to quote a company spokesman: "Going green does not cost the Earth."

A Mantsinen 95ER electric crane at work in Rauma

  

Very narrow aisle working gets safer

 Long-known for their space-saving advantages, articulated forklifts, however, require higher safety-conscious drivers when working in aisles 1.6mt-1.8mt wide than needed for drivers of conventional, counterbalanced and reach trucks in much wider aisles. This is one reason the more conventional forklift drivers need to retrain on articulated trucks. 

Collisions between forklifts and racking are a major cause of the worst kind of accidents after fire, namely domino-style rack collapses. Many of these collisions may be minor but how often are they reported to management? Accumulated, unreported damage of that nature if left ignored can lead to a disastrous collapse eventually. 

Now, however, that risk can be significantly cut if the trucks are fitted with Smart Stop, 'touch-sensitive' sensor, a recent, innovative device from Narrow Aisle fitted to their Flexi trucks which disables a truck after a collision with racking or pallets when in aisles. The drivers cannot override the system and so are forced to report the accidents to management for appropriate action. 

Smart Stop is quickly fitted to a truck's left and right-sided flanks and should go a long way to negating the problems of drivers who fail to pass on details of racking collisions. In Britain alone there are about 100 domino-style racking collapses, some involving fatalities.

To cut the risk of this with articulated forklifts consider adding touch-sensitive Smart Stop sensors to Flexi trucks.