Port Point Lisas anchors third award

THE Pt Lisas Shipping Port has “pulled off an unprecedented feat of being adjudged the best Port in the Caribbean for 2001, 2002 and 2003.” According to the chairman of the Pt Lisas Industrial Port Development Corporation (Plipdeco) Limited, Kayam Mohammed, the award is normally given by the Caribbean Shipping Association. Among the criteria considered were progress, productivity, use of its human resource base, reliability, speed of cargo-handling, promptness of delivery, and all round efficiency. The chairman said, “The fact that the award is based on direct feedback from you — our valued customers, makes us all the more proud of this achievement.” Mohammed was at the time addressing a gathering at a function to mark the commissioning of a Gantry crane, which is designed to improve the port’s productivity and to “ensure that we satisfy the needs of our customers so that we could maintain our reputation of being the most improved port in the Caribbean for a few more years.”

Mohammed added that although 2003 has been another successful year for Plipdeco, “it has not been without its challenges.” He explained that it was at this very time last year that Berth 5, with its promise of a quantum leap in throughput, was substantially completed. “In the ensuing 12 months We have had the difficult task of balancing the tooling of this new facility with our efforts to ensure the satisfaction of our loyal customers and to attract new business to our port. We are aware that some inconvenience has resulted and we apologise for that,” Mohammed said. He added that “Plipdeco’s business development efforts yielded fruit with the return of Tropical Shipping Lines to Port Point Lisas during the last quarter of 2003 with the port handling approximately 100,000 TEUs by year end and more than 65,000 tonnes of general and break bulk cargo.” In terms of containerised cargo, Mohammed said the figures “represents a near 300 percent increase over the 1998 figure of 36,402 TEUs — an impressive statistic indeed.”

He said the increase in port activity placed “our processes under severe stress, as greater throughput meant that we had to do things smarter, given the fact that the arrival of new equipment was not imminent and that you, our customers, were demanding higher levels of service.” Mohammed felt that “throughout the year there has been a continuous review of these processes and the fact that we were able to improve our productivity towards the end of the year is a tribute to the innovative techniques of our port management.” The chairman touched on the purchase of a new Fantuzzi MHC-200 crane and said it started operations without fanfare and has so far logged 800 running hours at an average of 15 container moves per hour. “In spite of some defects which are being addressed by the manufacturers, the crane has maintained 99 percent availability since its arrival and has become the backbone of our cargo-handling operations,” he said. He added that Plipdeco had now bought a Gantry crane, which would have been put into service on December 21. “This state of the art piece of equipment promises to double our productivity and place us in a different league,” Commander Mohammed stressed. He explained that Plipdeco had spent in the region of US$40 million within the last two years on “our ongoing port upgrade programme and as a service company, we can only maximise shareholder value by providing complete customer satisfaction and our investments and strategies are focused on achieving and sustaining just that.”