Dr -Ing. Mathias Dobner, Chairman, BoxBay, began his keynote speech at TLME’s Future-Proof Technologies Conference held recently in Dubai talking about the severe disruptions in supply chains and shipping over the last few years. The latest interruption being the Red Sea crisis.
Providing a glimpse into future supply chains, Dr Dobner said that they would require a reorientation and an operational shift away from the way the ports and shipping industry had been doing things for the last 30 years.
Today, said Dr Dobner, land was becoming scarce around ports and instead of expanding horizontally to meet their storage requirements, ports and terminals needed to think vertically.
The conventional method of stacking containers one over the other using rubber tyred gantry cranes was no longer efficient - even with the latest technologies.
DP World and SMS’ BoxBay was the result of out-of-the-box thinking that has provided an elegant and sustainable solution to the container stacking problem at ports and terminals.
At BoxBay, 11 containers stacked one above the other and each of these containers can be accessed directly in a single move thus getting rid of the problem of multiple crane moves to store or retrieve a single container.
Dr Dobner describes how DP World and SMS came together in an ambitious project to try and achieve what many others couldn’t before. BoxBay at Jebel Ali Port’s Terminal 4 is a proof-of-concept project that has completed thousands of moves that have demonstrate the reliability and speed of the system.
Read More: Watch: BOXBAY - Leading Innovation in the Supply Chain