Third-World Britain

In a few months, Brexit will become a hard reality in Britain. The government has nebulous plans for how they will handle foreign trade and customs. 

We don't hear much about the details of how international shipping actually works, but it seems that there are standards for providing information to ports when a shipment arrives. Usually the port will be given a file that describes what's on a container ship and how that ship is loaded. Not in Britain. 

In general in the container shipping world, every ship and port in the world uses the international standardized “baplie” .edi file for receiving and reviewing the ship’s loading plan. This stowage plan is composed either by the ship’s chief officer, by a central planner, or in the cases of small ships by the local port planners.

The little squares you see are the containers stowed on the ship, and powerful software assist the ship’s chief officer in determining the safe condition, segregation of dangerous goods on board and ship’s stability on departure, and also assist the terminal planners in determining the optimal loading sequence in order to make the most of the available cranes, labor and time in relation to the yard location of the containers on the load list that need to be loaded on the ship. The ship’s agent send in advance the load list in a compatible format that is easily imported in the planning software.

Now imagine my shock when I arrived in UK to meet with my employer and see my work place, when I saw the terminal staff working on the ship’s plan using an EXCEL FILE! To this day I do not understand how a container terminal with a healthy consistent traffic does not have the technical capacity to produce or even read an .edi file! Even third world countries like Somalia have this in their port!

Whenever a ship comes to he port, they are kindly asked to send the arrival (discharge plan) in either pdf or excel format file, which is embarrassing to say the least. Whenever a ship is loading in the terminal, they will a receive an excel file on which the planners MANUALLY TYPE IN each container serial, with it’s associated weight and DG information. I don’t even know from where to start to say what a time consuming inefficient and primitive way of planning this is.

This is mind-boggling and does bode well for the future.

I would like to know if this is common at all ports in Britain, or whether it is just the one port or the one company that the author is working for.