The shipping news

The Port of Rotterdam is one of the most important cargo junctions in the world, and Nico Westpalm van Hoorn is charged with ensuring operations run smoothly.

The genius of the Port of Rotterdam lies in its central location. Directly connected to the North Sea – the most heavily navigated sea in the world – and a European hinterland comprising of 400 million consumers, the facility is a major economic hub. Each year, 30,000 sea-going vessels and 130,000 inland navigation vessels call at the port of Rotterdam, and around 500 shipping lines maintaining regular services to over 1000 other ports all over the world count Rotterdam as an important stop. The port is Europe’s most important junction for oil and chemicals, containers, iron ore, coal, food and metals.

These huge cargo flows result in advantages of scale for both the shipping companies and shippers. But with a throughput of 406 million metric tons last year, maintaining an information technology infrastructure that can handle the enormous volumes of data required to manage such a complex ecosystem is a major challenge.

Nico Westpalm van Hoorn is responsible for adding value to the port’s business processes, managing safety for traffic and logistics and the leasing of the port’s land. As CIO, he aligns with his business managers to ensure they get the information they need to run their processes. As well as this, of course, he has to keep an IT organisation in place that can provide the services that are promised.

“ Alignment with the business is all about trust,” he says. “IT is always something that will happen in the future. You promise a system, but one that will work in the future: you can never deliver on the spot. Because you always deliver in the future, trust is the base to work together with your business to realise these goals. You need leadership to both convince your peers, your C-suite and your organisation that you need to work together to realise these goals.” According to van Hoorn, leadership is about creating a vision that people can believe in.

As you might imagine, the main challenge associated with the running of a port is that of logistics. Van Hoorn explains that he has two main tasks. “One is the leasing out of land and getting the right kind of companies to settle here in Rotterdam, rather than in Amsterdam or Antwerp or Felixstowe. That’s what we call the ‘dry’ side of our work, the land side. And we also have what we call the ‘wet’ side of our work, which is bringing in the ships safely and taking care that they move quickly through the port, with no collisions, and get their cargos off as fast as possible. Once the cargo is off-board – be it oil, or containers, or whatever – it’ll have to be put through to wherever its destination is – Germany, France, Eastern Europe, you name it.”

Van Hoorn’s task is to deliver the systems that can manage these information flows just-in-time, which means working together with many different parties. “It’s not just one company that runs the port – it’s a whole chain of partners working together on the logistics side. It’s the shipper, it’s the container terminal, it’s the transporter, it’s the people who receive the containers. So you see there are many parties involved in running the chain, and our job is bring them together and provide them with the information they need to do their own planning process.”

There are two projects that van Hoorn points to as his greatest achievements during his time at the port. The first is Port info-link (www.portinfolink.com), which is the single window one-stop shopping system built in Rotterdam to deliver value to all the parties who work together in the supply chain. He has also just completed an IT outsourcing project, which was undertaken when the port decided that it could work more successfully if it used IT partners to provide certain services. Given the growth of international trade, the demands on van Hoorn’s IT organisation were becoming unmanageable – the port has an annual growth of trade (largely thanks to the spectacular rise of China as an economic powerhouse) of between eight and 10 percent, and it handles over 10 million containers each year. “I realised that with an internal IT organisation you can’t have the continuity or the flexibility to keep improving your business in the speed and the scale that was needed,” he explains. “So t he decision was made to outsource all our ICT operations to an international company with a large Dutch footprint, Getronics.”

Today, van Hoorn’s biggest priority is concerned with core business: speeding up the throughput of containers through the port. This involves working together with all the parties concerned with bringing in the cargo, speeding it through the container terminal and bringing it to the hinterland. At the moment this process on average takes eight days, but van Hoorn’s aim is to get this down to six days. The port has specific critical performance indicators that it has to report about, and as van Hoorn explains, it is his job to see that the systems that help measure, monitor and improve them are all in place.

There is a problem with this as far as logistics goes though: there still aren’t enough parties connected in the supply chain, so a lot of the port’s energy has to go into managing this. “We have the Betuwe line you might have heard of, which is a new railway dedicated to cargo from Rotterdam through Holland and then to Germany. Managing this involves connecting all the rail operators and shippers. We are still working with them to use our port community system.”

One of the reasons this is so tough is that many SME companies in the supply chain struggle with their IT infrastructure because they don’t have the money, the energy or the motivation to be connected electronically. The port is trying to create a more user-friendly environment for these companies to make their logistic declarations, telling the terminals at what time containers will arrive so the planning process works smoothly.

Van Hoorn is the first to concede that there’s still a lot to achieve. “The future will be about broadband, about mobility, and trying to connect as many parties who work together as smoothly and seamlessly as possible,” he says – no small feat for a port that must support a logistical chain as complex as this. Luckily for them, van Hoorn – a man for whom solving technical problems has become “an addiction” – and his team are up to the challenge.

2007 throughput: Port of Rotterdam
Total incoming: 299,449,000 metric tons
Total outgoing : 107,363,000 metric tons
Total throughput: 406,812,000 metric tons

Risk Management
”Since 9/11, ports have had to enormously increase security levels, which is partly an ICT issue. It’s to do with having the right personnel given access to ships or to containers, making container changes secure, making sure no-one gets into a container and tampers with the content. That’s a big issue here in Rotterdam, as in every port. It’s partly an ICT issue, but also has to be managed by the owners and the parties involved in the supply chain themselves.”

Port Map
Rotterdam’s entire port and industrial complex covers 10,500 hectares and stretches out 40 kilometers in length; from the city to the Maasvlakte along the Nieuwe Waterweg canal.