On 28 October, the Ports of East London and Mossel Bay became the latest to go live with Transnet National Ports Authority’s new R79-million web-based Integrated Port Management System (IPMS). TNPA began registering East London and Mossel Bay port users onto the system from October 23 this year.
This brings the number of ports now using TNPA’s new ‘smartPORT’ technology to seven, after Durban, Cape Town, Saldanha, Port Elizabeth and Ngqura went live in recent months. In November the Port of Richards Bay will become the final South African port to roll out the technology.
The IPMS was developed by Navayuga Infotech, a company based in India, in collaboration with their South African partner Nambiti Technologies. It replaces the manual processes and enables key port operations to be managed online and in real time across TNPA’s commercial ports.
Since IPMS was first introduced in July, 250 vessel agents have registered on the system and more than 1000 vessel arrival notifications have been submitted across the seven ports.
Chief executive Richard Vallihu said: “Global ports are adopting ‘smartPORT’ concepts and the world is increasingly embracing digital technologies and data analytics to make sense of the information that we have around us. Gathering that information in the first place is a challenge. This online system will help transform our ocean gateways into smartPORTs by using advanced information technology that will make them more intelligent and sustainable, while conserving resources, time, space and energy.”
He added: “As TNPA we believe that the glue or the backbone of our entire port system is information systems, but in an integrated way, where we manage just about every input and output to make monitoring, tracking, evaluating and optimising a lot simpler.”
Vallihu said the IPMS was benchmarked against Malaysian and Singaporean ports which were among the world’s most efficient.
