A sea port sees 2 primary types of container flows, inbound containers arriving on ships and then loaded onto trucks and out bound containers that are received from trucks and loaded on ships. For the inbound containers, they would be unloaded from the ship by Rail Mounted Gantries (RMGs). The container would either be placed directly loaded onto a train/truck for departure (single handling) or to be placed on platform to be further placed on train/truck in a later time (double handling). Reports indicate 25% direct unload onto truck, and 45% direct unload onto train. 

Each lift of container would take about 45 Sec if placed to/from platform, and 75 seconds, if directly placed onto a truck/train. Each truck can handle 2 containers, and each train would be able to carry 180 containers on average. An arriving ship would contain about ~8000 containers. For outbound containers, the containers would arrive via truck (which would carry two containers in)or by train (the arriving trains would carry 180 containers). The containers would then either be loaded directly into a vessel (35% of truck and 55% of train) or would be placed on floor for later load onto a ship. The direct lift from truck/train into ship would take 90 Sec while the lift from truck/train onto platform and from platform to ship would take 45 Sec on average. 

In the interest of business efficiency, a train/ship/truck would only depart only if all the available slots are fully utilized! Also, arriving ships/trains/trucks are fully loaded. According to the operations report, about 40% of total containers are transported to/from the port via truck, and the remaining would be transported via rail. There are “x” number of RMGs located in the port, and they operate 24/7 (24 hours a day, 7 days a week). 

For the ease of calculation, all months can be assumed to have 30 days, and the port operates all the year-long. 

a) Draw the process flow for containers in the terminal. a. Which operation is the bottleneck on the operation? 

b. Is the bottleneck different for inbound containers than of outbound containers? b) You are also asked if you could come up with any suggestion regarding process improvement. 

c) Calculate how long would it take to load/unload a ship? hint: you need to first find out what is the minimum number of RMGs to be able to handle the visited ships, and based on that, calculate the turnaround time of the ship. 

d) What is the utilization of RMGs for different months? 

e) There is a debate among operations managers and site managers about the double handling process (the process that a container would be first placed on ground and then to truck/train/ship, as opposed to direct load/unload). Given the stochastic nature of the demand arrival (with peak days on Fridays with 50% above the average load for the port), discuss the pros and cons of the double handling process. The discussion should be clear, specific, concise, and practical.