[HN Gopher] Container Logistics
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Container Logistics
Author : secondary
Score : 110 points
Date : 2021-11-12 22:13 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lesswrong.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lesswrong.com)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Similarly, I could stack the containers much more closely
| together, sacrificing the "random access" property in the
| process, to create extra space in the port that might increase
| average throughput. However, this would destroy any guarantee
| that a given container will ever get out of the port. Humanity as
| a whole might be better off, but the owner of that particular
| cargo will be severely affected.
|
| Doesn't averaging already handle this exact problem?
| superice wrote:
| Expert here: I'm a consultant for small to medium size container
| terminals and various hinterland container logistics operations.
| This article is a pretty good introduction to the subject, but
| could go further into the economic interests at play here.
|
| If you book at a shipping line, there is really a tree of
| companies being engaged to work. There are two empty depots
| involved for empty pickup and delivery. The container is usually
| owned by the shipping line, but stored at various third party
| locations. Then there is the two sea side terminals, who need to
| do 4 billable operations usually called Terminal Handling Charges
| or THC for short. These are in order gate-in land, out onto ship,
| in from ship, gate-out landside. Then there is the temporary
| storage at the sea side terminals on either side. For you as the
| shipper you can usually deliver the full container a few days
| before the cargo closing for outbounds, and you get a few days to
| pick up the full container once it is discharged off the ship.
| Failing two meet these time windows will result either in your
| container getting rejected at the gate, which is expensive
| because you have to pay for the hinterland transport 3 times
| instead of once (try #1, return after fail, retry). Alternatively
| you pay the storage costs, these are often called demurrage
| charges. In addition to these all there are restrictions on the
| time you as the shipper can take to stuff or strip (fill/empty)
| the container, going over this you're going to get charged
| something called detention charges (a late fee or "renting" free
| for the container, you get X days included in the transport).
|
| The tricky part comes in when the ETA of the ship shifts. Say you
| already picked up the container from the empty depot to stuff it,
| but then the shipping line notifies you the ship is delayed by a
| week. You now have to store it somewhere, and if you're not
| careful, the shipping line will try and charge you detention
| fees. If you deliver it "early" to the terminal (e.g. in time for
| the old ETA, but early according to the new ETA) you've created a
| problem for the terminal (high yard utilization), you're going to
| get charged a demurrage fee, or the terminal will not accept the
| container and send the trucker on their way again, causing you to
| have to pay for the transport. Notice how in none of these cases
| the shipping line is impacted, and sometimes they even profit off
| of it.
|
| One of the ways to avoid this might be to book more door-to-door
| transports (or 'carrier haulage') as opposed to arranging the
| hinterland transports yourself (or 'merchant haulage'). This is
| often not ideal because it requires shipping lines to have
| specific knowledge of the hinterlands they serve, but also puts
| the onus on them and them only to fix this. It also does put even
| more power into the hands of shipping lines, which is something
| the sector should probably avoid.
|
| The removal of the 2-high stacking limit only helps to relieve
| pressure on the 'hinterland' storage equation of it all, it does
| nothing for the sea side terminals which are already running at
| capacity.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Were there not that many empty containers sitting on container
| chassis?
| superice wrote:
| Yes, probably! This is directly related to the detention
| issue: many containers stay on the same chassis from pickup
| at the empty depot until they get delivered at the sea
| terminal. Equipment to handle containers properly is not
| cheap (think reachstackers, not regular forklifts). ETAs of
| ships getting pushed back means longer waiting times till the
| containers can be delivered and thus they spend longer on
| chassis. I'm not too sure who bears the financial impact of
| that, it might be that trucking companies include chassis
| rent in the transport, or they might similarly charge after X
| days of usage. Pretty sure the shipping line does never
| assume liability for this though, so either the shipper or
| the trucker is getting shafted.
| sleavey wrote:
| What happens when the fees due on collection get so high that
| the importer / final delivery company / final customer changes
| their mind about collecting the container? Who has to store and
| ultimately dispose of the contents? Do they get to auction it
| off and keep the proceeds?
| superice wrote:
| I have no clue, never have heard of that happening, but then
| again, I never bothered to ask. I suspect that customs issues
| would be the more common use case to not actually want to
| pick up a container though.
|
| The fees are not usually due on collection, but as part of
| the contract between shipping line and shipper. Not picking
| up the container probably does nothing to get you out from
| under that contract.
| mdorazio wrote:
| I'd love to see a business flow diagram of how all this works
| and which parties are responsible at each step. The deeper I
| look into the shipping process the more complex and grift-
| oriented it seems to get.
| capableweb wrote:
| > The deeper I look into the shipping process the more
| complex and grift-oriented it seems to get.
|
| The more industries I start to get deeper into, the more I
| realize this applies to almost every single industry, no
| matter size or for how long it's been around. Industries
| seems get into "extract as much money from as many parties as
| possible" really quickly.
| superice wrote:
| It is incredibly interesting to me, yeah. I'm not going to
| lie, I have 25 pages of a book sitting around in my Google
| Drive, but I quickly realized two things: 1) this will be the
| most boring book in existence, and requires a much better
| writer than me to make for an interesting read. And 2) lots
| of my knowledge is specific to the European situation, which
| can sometimes be wildly different. The shipping industry can
| be surprisingly locally focused.
|
| But I might draw out a few diagrams and write a blog post
| some day :)
| superice wrote:
| Actually, I had this write-up lying around which I wrote
| for somebody involved in building a container terminal
| simulation game: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX
| -1vQYtBzhkogHUvn2z...
|
| It's pretty specific to terminals, but it's a decent
| introduction.
| jcranmer wrote:
| I noticed on your section on inland terminals that
| there's no mention of rail-based terminals, which is
| interesting because that is the dominant form of inland
| terminal I think about. Are they rare in Europe (or,
| equivalently, are they unusually common in the US), or is
| this just something that you're not familiar with?
| superice wrote:
| Yes, this is definitely my personal experience shining
| through: my primary experience is with inland terminals
| which predominantly handle barges. In the Rhine-delta
| (the Rotterdam/Antwerp hinterland) this is much more
| common than rail terminals, although trimodal
| (barge/rail/truck) are on the rise. Most hinterlands
| however don't have fine mazed rivers and canals suitable
| for water transport like The Netherlands, Germany, and
| Belgium have, so in other areas of the world (notably the
| US) rail-based inland terminals are a lot more common.
|
| But inland terminals are an entirely different beast from
| sea terminals due to the scaling I mentioned. Area scales
| quadratically, but quay side or rail length scales
| linearly. This means larger sea terminals have lots of
| trouble managing an efficient flow of containers onto and
| from the ships. Inland terminals, both barge and rail,
| are often not constrained by this in and out flow, but
| have more natural constraints like the total amount of
| containerizable goods transported in the geographic area
| they serve.
|
| The biggest difference is probably what parts of the
| transport inland terminals are responsible for. In The
| Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany I've noticed that often
| inland terminals act as hinterland operators, also taking
| responsibility for the barge or train leg, and usually
| also last mile trucking to the customer. Sea side
| terminals tend to not do this nearly as much.
|
| So TL;DR: yes, rail is the dominant form basically
| everywhere except the area where I happen to live and
| work. But no, both rail and barge inland terminals are
| very similar in many respects, but are quite different
| from sea side terminal operations.
|
| EDIT: Actually, just to clarify, I have a lot more
| experience with inland terminals than sea side terminals.
| But because the typical container terminal problems
| (berthing, stacking, equipment assignment etc.) are so
| much less of an issue with the smaller scale of inland
| terminals, they only get a very short mention in my
| document. There really is no berthing problem if you
| handle 2 barges a week, there is no equipment assignment
| problem if you have a single crane and a single
| reachstacker, and there is no real stacking problem if
| you can ask a trucker to walk around and spot their
| assigned box between the ~300 boxes you currently have.
| Typically the biggest issue for inland terminal
| operations is the transport planning from and to the sea
| side terminals, and that is similar for both barge and
| rail terminals.
| nullstyle wrote:
| Super interesting. Thank you for this link and your posts
| above!
| cardosof wrote:
| > The deeper I look into the shipping process the more
| complex and grift-oriented it seems to get.
|
| If you don't like what you see, then you shouldn't look into
| advertising and ad tech.
| CalChris wrote:
| They may be more efficient for the shipping line but do the
| 20,000 TEU behemoths (ULVC) exacerbate the problem?
| superice wrote:
| Yes and no. Yes because you can't run a ship carrying some
| containers on a certain line as often, which means that the
| wait after missing a ship is likely going to be bigger. But
| also no because fundamentally the problem of having 10
| delayed 2000 TEU ships is not that different from 1 ship of
| 20,000 TEU. Not to mention that ships only got about 2x
| bigger over the past 20 years, so the numbers I just pulled
| out of my ass are quite arbitrary.
|
| More smaller ships would give a bit more flexibility, but I
| don't think it's an easy fix for the current problems.
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(page generated 2021-11-13 23:03 UTC)