A view of the Port of Port-of-Spain last week.

Photo: Shirley Bahadur

I recently had a conversation with one of this country’s top business executives. The man was extremely worried about the fact that the Port of Port-of-Spain was a serious drag on T&T’s drive to become more competitive.

He pointed out that there were containers five stories high on the port and that the delays in unloading them were adding to the cost of production.

The executive said, for example, that because of the horrendous delays on the port, his company has to maintain a four month stock of inventory.

As anyone who has run a business or studied business would know, inventory is one of the yard-sticks used to determine an efficient operation. This is because a large inventory has implications for additional storage costs, unnecessary transportation costs, additional man-hour costs and the all-too-frequent “facilitation” payments (please note, I did not use the word “bribe”).

As one can imagine, all of these additional costs are having a profound impact on manufacturers’ cost of production and the cost of imports. And, at a time when wages are being raised and money is flowing through the economy, importers especially—and manufacturers who depend on the local market—have no problem passing on these additional costs to consumers. This in turn means that T&T has a higher cost of living than it should.

Two related things happened two weeks ago which had an impact on the developments at the port: the Manufacturers Association and the T&T Chamber held a seminar on port delays last week Wednesday and the Port Authority released a newspaper advertisement on Saturday which outlined changes to the way in which it would handle containers.

Because I was finishing that week’s Business Guardian, and also because (from memory) the port seminar was held in the morning, I could not attend. I would imagine, however, that Noel Garcia, the Port Authority’s chairman, would have spoken on the new procedures which were outlined in the newspaper advertisement, at length.

The new procedure at the port is called the container terminal management system (CTMS) and from what was outlined in the advertisement, it could be the revolutionary change that manufacturers and importers have been clamouring for.

The CTMS has been fully operational since March 14, according to the ad. It really baffles me why the port would announce something so important in such an offhand way.

It seems to me that the more appropriate way to have dealt with such information would have been for the Port Authority to have called a full news conference on the day before the TTMA/Chamber seminar.

That way the message of the changes at the port would have been broadcast and published on the day of the seminar and the function could have been used as a sounding board for the private sector.

In case you missed the full-page, black and white advertisement (and it was published in the wrong newspaper on a weekend when many businesspeople would have been enjoying the holiday week with their families) I will run down some of the main features of the new system.

The new system promises to make the Port of PoS, still T&T’s main container delivery location, more efficient by improving the tracking of container movements and managing the space on the terminal more effectively.

It will do this by eliminating redundant forms, improve gate processing and streamlining the allocation of resources to the operations.

Unfortunately, the advertisement did not give a sense of how the new system and procedures will address the legitimate concerns raised by the business executive with me last week.

It did not say, for example, that the clearing time for the delivery of a container through the port would be reduced from days to hours in the space of six months.

It did not say that the Port Authority’s aim was to ensure that the delivery of containers at the Port of PoS would be on par with developed countries eventually or even more progressive developing countries at some point soon.

And it did not say that the new procedures at the Port of PoS would be coupled with new procedures at Customs, which I am told, is a big part of the problem with the clearing of goods at the port.

Customs, which is worthy of a Business Guardian investigation, operates what is largely a non-computerised environment which is bureaucratic, outdated and in need of serious reform.

It seems to me that introducing this new system will only go part of the way to addressing the problem of delays at the port.

One of the few people who is able to address the questions raised earlier (questions which should have been posed at a news conference) is Garcia who told me that prior to the introduction of the computerised system, the Port of PoS relied on memory and back-of-the-hand calculations to determine the location of the 400,000 containers which passed through the port last year.

As a result of the introduction of the new system, the length of time it will take to clear containers will be reduced from five to eight hours to between 30 minute and one hour.

“Once the kinks have been worked out of the system and the people are up to mark, there should be a significant increase in productivity at the port within two to three months,” Garcia said.

He disclosed that the Port Authority retrained existing staff to work the new system with some people being sent to ports in Boston and Houston for exposure to new techniques.

“So whereas before people walked around with a pen and paper, now they will be walking with a hand-held computer.”

The entire system cost only $5 million to implement, said Garcia, which raises the issue of why it wasn’t done years ago, don’t you think?