Terminals are continuously focused on increasing the productivity and reducing their costs in order to obtain outstanding performance. Although, most terminal operators will agree that gains in performance are achieved through process improvement, it is also true that not all will meet the desired outcome.
Terminal operators are relying heavily on the TOS for data storage and order management, but for terminal planning and control, they need to rely on people. Operations require human intervention for various decision-making scenarios, considering the working environment is very dynamic and there are different constraints which cannot be determined ahead of time. Nearly all control strategies are reactive rather than pro-active, and even in automated terminals, there is a high percentage of manual intervention besides exception handling. The lack of foreseen human behaviour is a recurring reason for certain mistakes during execution and planning. These mistakes are not easily identified by reviewing the data in the TOS; hence, it will not be considered during the improvement process in most cases.
