By Eamonn Ryan
Cape Town’s port problems cannot be solved inside the port gates. A proposed whole-value-chain ‘war room’ could change how the city’s fruit export logistics are managed.
© Cold Link Africa
Cape Town’s preparations for the coming fruit export season are going beyond additional labour and increased rail capacity. While Transnet is making changes to ensure that the port can exploit short weather windows, the Department of Transport is also considering a more fundamental change: bringing the entire export value chain into the port’s operational decision-making process.
The proposal emerged from discussions between government, freight agents and shipping lines following the severe disruptions experienced during the previous deciduous fruit season. It reflects a simple but important observation: not every problem affecting the port is actually caused by the port.
A container may be delayed before it reaches the terminal. A cold store may be unable to release cargo on schedule. A truck may be caught in congestion. Rail capacity may be insufficient. A shipping line may have to adjust its schedule.
By the time the problem becomes visible at the port, the underlying cause may already be somewhere else in the supply chain.
From a Transnet war room to a port community
Transnet has traditionally used operational ‘war rooms’ to monitor and respond to problems within its own infrastructure and operations. Industry stakeholders now want that concept expanded. Transport Minister Barbara Creecy said what particularly interested her in discussions with industry was the recognition that many of the factors influencing port performance were outside Transnet’s direct control.
Stakeholders had effectively told government: “Your war rooms are fine, but your war rooms are focused on Transnet itself.”
The proposed solution is a war room dealing with the whole value chain. That would bring producers, freight agents, storage facilities, transporters, rail operators, shipping lines and other relevant stakeholders into a common operational framework. The emphasis would be on shared information, visibility and accountability.
“Now we need to [set] up a war room that [deals] with the whole value chain. And everybody in that value chain has to be accountable,” Creecy said.
Competing companies, shared information
One of the biggest challenges will be establishing what information needs to be shared – and persuading commercial competitors to share it. During August and September, stakeholders are expected to work on baseline information-sharing protocols.
The objective is to establish a common understanding of what information is required for the value chain to operate effectively, while addressing the obvious commercial sensitivities involved when competing businesses are asked to co-operate. The long-term ambition is to move beyond manual co-ordination towards an IT platform capable of managing the information across the value chain.
Creecy said the eventual system is envisaged as being AI-backed. But there is no intention of waiting for the technology before improving coordination. “Of course, in the long term, we want to put in an IT system to handle this. But while we are developing that system, we’ve got to be using human beings,” she said.
Why this matters to the cold chain
For South Africa’s fruit exporters, the implications extend well beyond conventional port logistics. Much of the cargo moving through Cape Town is temperature-sensitive. Deciduous fruit, citrus and other perishables depend on an uninterrupted cold chain from packhouse to vessel.
Every delay creates a potential knock-on effect. A weather closure at the port can leave containers waiting. A shortage of trucks can delay deliveries from cold stores. A shortage of rail capacity can push more cargo onto already congested roads. A missed vessel can then create further delays as exporters wait for the next sailing. The result is that port efficiency is inseparable from cold-chain efficiency.
The proposed whole-value-chain approach could therefore be particularly important for South Africa’s temperature-controlled export industries. Instead of each participant optimising its own operation, the objective would be to understand the performance of the complete chain.
That means knowing where cargo is, when it is likely to arrive, whether the receiving facility has capacity, whether transport is available, whether rail capacity exists and whether the vessel can accommodate the cargo.
From firefighting to forecasting
This could ultimately represent a shift from reactive port management to predictive logistics. The immediate response to last season’s problems is understandably operational: increase labour, increase rail movements and make better use of available equipment.
But the longer-term opportunity is to identify bottlenecks before they become crises. An integrated information system could potentially provide stakeholders with a common operational picture of the export chain, allowing emerging congestion or capacity constraints to be identified earlier.
That is where the proposed AI component becomes particularly interesting. Artificial intelligence will not solve a shortage of stevedores, a closed berth or inadequate rail capacity. What it can potentially do is help stakeholders analyse large quantities of operational information and identify patterns, risks and emerging bottlenecks faster than conventional manual systems.
The technology, however, is only as useful as the information being fed into it. That makes the current exercise to establish common baseline data arguably more important than the eventual software platform.
Cape Town’s port problem is a supply-chain problem
The uncomfortable reality is that improving the Port of Cape Town is not simply a matter of buying more cranes or increasing terminal capacity. Last season demonstrated that billions of rand of investment in equipment can still fail to deliver the desired result if weather, labour, rail, trucking and cargo flows are not co-ordinated.
The new approach recognises that a port is not an isolated facility. It is the physical hub of a much larger logistics ecosystem. For South Africa’s fruit industry, getting that ecosystem to work more effectively could be as important as improving the port itself.
Cape Town may therefore still have a long way to go before it sheds its unwanted reputation as one of the world’s worst-performing ports. But if the proposed port community can turn competing interests into shared operational visibility – and if the planned digital systems eventually make that visibility predictive – the city could at least begin moving from “the worst in the world, but better” towards something considerably more useful for exporters.