Today we toured the Piraeus Container Terminal (PCT for short), first on the bus driving around the port, and it’s headquarters by foot. On the bus ride you could really see how big these cranes are as they towered over us as we drove by. The different colors signify the old cranes to the new ones. The newer ones are semi-autonomous, meaning that they could be handled in the headquarters instead of in the crane itself. However with this technology, PCT is not using it as they want to keep the jobs of the crane workers. Another observation was their sorting of containers. First they sort them into outgoing containers or containers that are being offloaded. From those distinctions they sort them by type of container, for example, refrigerated or dry. Throughout the bus part of the trip, it was very apparent about the size of the ships that they dock. They take in big ships, known as mother ships, that require many cranes to offload and load. With the constant and volume of shipments that they have they require and have many vehicles to move the containers around the port. During the headquarters visit, we talked about their sustainability and digitalization efforts. For sustainability, they hope to move their almost 3000 fleet of trucks to electrical trucks to cut down CO2e on the ground. For the sea, they are researching a more sustainable fuel for the ships. Digitally, they have developed a system that shares important information quickly to stakeholders and employees. Depending on the stakeholder or the rank of employee, certain information can be accessed for their need. This is done to keep important information secretive and only to the people who need it while allowing everyone to use one application instead of making multiple for different positions. This also allows for people who need to input data into the system to only have to input it into one place instead of multiple places.

SOTD: All Falls Down by Kanye West