Progress reported on Port Community System

The country's efforts to establish a port community system (PCS) is progressing steadily, according to a recent presentation by manager for the project, Dwain Powell.

A port community system is a central database which provides integration of commercial and logistics activities among companies involved in the export and import process. Such firms include trading companies, shipping agents and brokers, forwarding agencies, truckers, terminal operators, and customs and ports authorities.

Powell, whose services were engaged last year by the Port Authority of Jamaica (PAJ) and the Shipping Association of Jamaica (SAJ), said stage one of the project, the request for proposal (RFP) is now complete. "We have received three responses from industry leaders globally for port community systems," Powell announced.

The next step, he said, will be to engage the services of technical consultants and a legal manager for the project. The positions were advertised last year. Following this, the remaining steps are: Stage Two RFP, Contract/Financial Closure, Implementation and Operations and Maintenance. The project should be completed in line with the expansion of the locks in the Panama Canal.

He was speaking at a lunch-and-learn seminar hosted by the SAJ on January 16 at the association's Newport West complex. The seminar was sponsored by ADVANTUM, a company engaged in the development, hosting, and servicing of information technology services for ports and other users.

With key players in the industry present at the seminar, Powell used the opportunity to inform stakeholders of the benefits of a PCS, which, he said, was critical for positioning Jamaica as a global logistics hub for the region.

Impact on businesses

Powell listed the impact of the PCS on doing business:

These trends present an opportunity for the development of logistics services which have the potential to increase significantly foreign direct investment, trade volumes, government revenues, and employment levels.

Reduction in paper costs and hard, copy documentation.

Significant business process re-engineering will be done so as to improve productivity and efficiencies.

Vertical integration of entities.

Stakeholders becoming secondary service providers of the PCS functionality.

The PCS will enable stakeholders to:

Link all port players

Make the global logistics process reliable (export, trans-shipment, and import)

Manage the physical, administrative, and documentary flows of cargo

Exchange messages safely and confidentially.

"Jamaica stands to benefit from increased port revenues and national taxation revenues from higher volumes of vessels and containers, and more, but smaller consignments as just-in-time techniques become adopted locally and regionally," Powell said.

Many advantages

He noted that the ability for various stakeholders to trace and track shipments, lower transactional processing times and costs, improve private sector and international supply chains for efficiencies and economies, the ability for Customs to improve its risk-management framework, and the ability to provide real-time statistics to various stakeholders in the trade community are among the benefits of the PCS.

ADVANTUM, formerly Port Computer Services, is a subsidiary of the Shipping Association of Jamaica. It was established in 1981 to provide information technology infrastructure and systems support to the local port community and the wider Caribbean maritime sector.

The company has since evolved into the leading IT service provider to more than 30 entities in the shipping industry and beyond. ADVANTUM focuses especially on systems development and maintenance, application hosting, hot site (back-up) services, Internet, and network services. ADVANTUM is the pioneer in the computerisation of the Port of Kingston, one of the hemisphere's premier and most strategically located trans-shipment ports.