If marine terminal operators had their way, the days of individual truckers entering their facilities in search of specific containers would be over, replaced by a model in which containers are peeled off the top of a stack and delivered to truckers without regard to consignee or destination.
This free-flow model is operating to a limited extent in Los Angeles-Long Beach, and it is producing positive results, a Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals roundtable in Los Angeles was told Thursday.
“This is a proven process,” said Brett Parker, founder and COO of Cargomatic, an online service that connects shippers with carriers. A pilot project at the West Basin Container Terminal at the Port of Los Angeles has cut trucker turn times in half, streamlining the delivery of containers for the terminal, the truckers and the beneficial cargo owners that participate in free-flow.
The concept behind free-flow is to aggregate containers from BCOs that are served by a participating motor carrier. Inbound containers are discharged from the vessel and are segregated into a pile. When a critical mass is accumulated, the motor carrier is notified and drivers are dispatched to the terminal. A longshoreman assigned to the stack peels each container from the top and delivers it to the next trucker in line. Upon exiting the terminal, the driver goes either to the trucking company’s yard, or directly to the BCO’s warehouse.
Parker said that even when terminals in Los Angeles-Long Beach were experiencing gate times of two hours or longer during the port congestion of recent months, drivers serving the free-flow stack were averaging 42-minute turn times.
Free-flow resembles the traditional landbridge operation for intermodal cargo that rail-dependent ports such as Los Angeles-Long Beach have had for years. Intermodal rail is ideal for this type of operation because a single rail carrier generates hundreds of containers from each vessel, and the containers are trucked to the same rail head. “This process works with volume,” Parker said.
In order to make free-flow feasible for local delivery to BCOs, it is usually necessary to aggregate the volumes of several retailers or other midsize to large importers. “If a BCO has 100 containers on the ship, and the trucker can get several BCOs together, this is a solution,” he said.
A third-party logistics provider can be an aggregator of cargo in the free-flow scenario. Caryn Blanc, an owner and managing director of the Triangle Group in Los Angeles and New Jersey, said she has multiple BCO customers, none of which are large enough individually to qualify for free-flow. However, by aggregating the containers of several customers, Triangle builds the critical mass that is necessary.
Triangle’s customers are pleased with the results, and the truck drivers who shuttle the containers from the marine terminal to Triangle’s facility are “extraordinarily excited,” she said. Drivers who had been getting only one to 1 1/2 turns a day before free-flow are now getting three to four turns a day, Blanc said.
Free-flow is beneficial for West Basin Container Terminal, said Ryan Molinaro, who manages the terminal for Ports America. In the traditional model of hunting for a specific container for an individual trucker, yard crane operators usually move three or four containers to get to the specific box. Studies have shown that in busy ports such as Los Angeles-Long Beach, a transtainer operator lifts 125 to 150 containers a day, but only 45 to 55 of those moves result in a delivery to truckers. “We kept asking, how do we get rid of those dead moves,” he said.
Free-flow also fits in with the current strategy of ocean carriers, which is to keep marine containers close to the seaport so the contents can be transloaded to domestic containers and the marine containers are repositioned back to Asia, said Brian Catron, director of product management at APL Logistics. “There is a resistance to shipping containers to inland locations,” he said.
The concept can be further enhanced if containers are block-stowed on the vessel in Asia so that when the ship arrives at the Southern California marine terminal, the free-flow containers are discharged together and moved immediately to the designated pile, he added.
Cargo surges from today’s mega-ships now total 5,000 to more than 10,000 container moves during each vessel call in Los Angeles-Long Beach. Free-flow at present is nibbling around the edges of those volumes. However, the goal of both ports is to expand creative options such as free-flow and container dray-offs to near-dock yards in order to relieve congestion at the marine terminals.
Parker said it is therefore important that more trucking companies that are able to aggregate the container volumes of multiple customers will join the program, although this will be a lengthy process. “We block and tackle one at a time,” he said.
