REPORTS OF COMPANY VISITS

VRiSBI International Research Project Ireland 2007

DUBLIN PORT

Tuesday the 9

of October 2007

On Tuesday October the eighth we visited the Dublin Port Company (DPC). This company is aself-financing and semi-state owned organisation. The goal of DPC is to facilitate the flow of goods, passengers and attendant tracking information through the port. This means that DPCdoesn’t actually do the flow of goods themselves, but rather help to organise all the port activitiesin an efficient and secure way. They give licenses to companies to use the terminals, they have atowage and pilot service, they take care of the marine traffic control and they arrange the securityin the port to give some examples of DPC activitiesIn 2007 the DPC has its tenth birthday; before the DPC was called into being the state would doall the activities in the port themselves. In the ten years that the DPC is operational it has realizeda tremendous growth in transport, to be more exact it has doubled its throughput. This is probablydue to the way the port is now setup, with the DPC in a central roll and a highly improvedinfrastructure. It is also likely that the general growth in Ireland, the Celtic tiger, plays a part. Themost amazing detail is that all this growth was realized without any expansions of the port interms of land. Before these changes the Dublin Port was losing market share to competitors, had alack of capital investments and also had very high internal costs. This was all turned around bythe DPC.The Dublin Port Company is led by a board of directors. This board contains a chairman and achief executive amongst others. This board contains people out of the business world, peopleappointed by the city of Dublin and people appointed by the government of Ireland. The idea behind this is to create a board that looks after the interests of the stakeholders, Dublin andIreland in general. This board is supported by a management team, who will take care of certainfields in the company.One of these is the IT manager, Mister Connor Farrell, which gave us a presentation about IT &the port and after that a tour of the port. During the presentation Mr. Farrell gave us an insight inthe part that the IT played in the growth of the Dublin Port. When the DPC started they had avery poor ICT system. It had a lack of integrated ICT systems, the Management InformationSystem (MIS) was inadequate, the invoicing was very slow and there were poor communication possibilities with the customer. The poor state of the ICT system played a big part in the highcosts of operations in the port and the long time needed for them. DPC decided to start a new ICTsystem from zero. This new ICT system has an adequate MIS and a focus on customer communication among other functionalities. The whole system is wireless in the whole port sothat all customers and every employee of DPC can access their support systems. All thesechanges have led to a higher efficiency and customer satisfaction. An example of an achievementof this new ICT system is the price per unit of throughput; this has gone down with 50%,expressed in real terms (euros corrected by inflation).

The future goals of DPC are to maintain the current growth and leading market position inIreland. They main challenges are the current rate of inflation in Ireland and the size of thecurrent port. There is a little stretch left in the area of the port but they will have to expand ontonew land in the near future if they want to facilitate to the current growth rates. A possible optionis to make an extra patch of land into current sea space. However there are a lot of objections bycitizens of Dublin to this expansion and there are also some problems regarding federallegislations. Another option is to make more efficient use of the current landmass. Another impact on the daily business is the security rush after 9/11. There are a lot of new legislations likethe ISPS code that force ports to improve there security level. This will of course cost a lot of investments and threatens the efficiency of DPC. One of the innovative implementations thatDPC is working on is the use of CCTV. CCTV stands for Closed-Circuit Television; this is asurveillance implementation that brings a higher level of security. DPC is also looking into theuse of RFID chips and electronics seals, but they were still in an orienting phase in which nothingcould be said of the future plans.During the presentation we got the idea that DPCs company structure was heavily focused on thecost efficiency and improving efficiency in this way. But they do this by using best practices andfocusing on core activities. In this picture innovation didn’t play a part and so we can call DPC are-active company regarding innovation. An example that comes closest to an innovation we cangive is the ICT system that was build from scratch and uses a wireless network for customer andemployees.To conclude this report we think that DPC can reach their goals if they keep on focusing on their core activities and by keeping informed about best practices in the industry. This formula has proven successfully in the past ten years and we see no reason why this would change. Thecompetitors will have the same kind of problems regarding security and so their efficiency will beunder as much pressure as those of DPC.