Description About the Port

The report analyses the various aspects of the management planning in the port of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. The aim of this report is to discuss the different disciplines like economics, business management, environment as well as location for successful planning for the port management. It balances business, capacity of the port, environment and economy then utilize it according to the customer demand. The reportfocuses on the description of the port, its services, strategic planning, the various internal and external factors effecting the business and final recommendation for improvement.

The port of Brisbane is the largest multi-cargo port of Queensland and one of the fastest growing as well as third busiest container port in Australia. It is situated lower reaches of the Brisbane river in the suburb of Brisbane.  This port is managed by the Port of Brisbane Pty Ltd under a lease from the government of Queensland. This limited is owned by the Q Port Holdings Consortium that comprises world’s four largest and experienced investors in infrastructure sector.

The organization has a Chief Executive Officer with five executive team members. It has seven business units that ensure and meet the port’s corporate objectives. The business units include Finance, Property, Human Resources, Communications, Port Services, Infrastructure and Environment and finally Strategy and Innovation unit (Bichou, Bell and Evans 2013).

The Port is one of the largest container port in Queensland as well as Australia. It has a total container throughput of more than 1,067,000 TEUs in 2015. Of this throughput, at around 50 percent were full imports, 32 percentwere empty containers. The bulk of the containers almost more than 90 percent are usually transported to or from Brisbane Port by road and the remainder were transported to the regional centres through its Multimodal Terminal. For the import containers, 30 percentin approximate value were unpacked at Port as well as in the nearby areas, 62.6 percent were unpacked within the city of Brisbane and 89 percent within 90 km near the Port. For export containers, 30 percentwere packed at Port 40percent are within Brisbane, 75percent within 100 km near the Port (Woo and Moon 2014). The distribution of the import container destinations as well as export container origins leads to the container trucks that used most sections of road networks as well as local road networks for accessing destinations. The traffic conditions on these road sections that connect to the Port are potential of high congestion levels. Significant volumes of non-containerised freight comprise 232,000 motor vehicles, 475,000 tonnes break bulk steel, 29,500 units’ project cargo, 2 million tonnes grain as well as other cereals and approximately 9 million tonnes coal.

The Strategic Planning for managing the Port of Brisbane needs to have some basic elements that custom a policy framework for the Board governance, pronouncement making as well as staff action. The chief Strategic Planning Elements will focus on the

• Guiding Principles
• Strategic Priority Areas
• Goals and Objectives
• Implementing Actions
• Priority-Setting

The board articulates some values that are applied to the whole organization is its guiding principles (Caton and Harvey 2015). The close situational analysis reflects on the planning process that needs for clarity about the purpose, decision-making measures and primacies across the business lines and the whole organization (Benham et al 2016). It also needs to be focused on the Fiscal prudence. For unifying the port activities and building consistency in the decision making procedure. This is the heart of thestrategies. It needs the clarity of roles as well as accountability, integration among the business lines along with support divisions and improved communication (Cimpeanu, Devine and O’Brien 2017).

Strategic Planning

Strategic Priority

The port of Brisbane has an extraordinary history of innovation that is promoted by the Board. The guiding principles are examined for adding common themes as well as explore the structural, strategic implications. The priority areas are:

• Accountability and stewardship
• Operations and port workforce
• Sustainable business
• Economic development
• Communication

Theseareas are given extra priority andhelp in forming new perspectives as well as designing the organization.

The goals of the Port authority have long-termpolicy statements and the objectives are specifically tailored for accomplishing the goals (Alderton and Saieva 2013). Both the objectives and goals reflect the company’s guiding principles for developing and address the specific priority areas (Curtis 2017). These objectives constitute all the tactics that the employees and the Board utilise for activing the strategic priority areas. The objectives are-

• Maintaining growth of the core business
• Aggressively obtaining external grants as well as government funding
• Improving the port’s economic position
• Aligning with the workforce, management practices and organizational structure for best performance
• Promotion of equal access to business opportunities
• Creating sustainable financial growth of the port as well as beyond
• Improving internal governance
• Promoting a response as well as proactive communication system.

The executing actions are particularly measurable actions which are important to determine the success of the objectives. These are specific, time bound initiative that are identified as well as developed for supporting plan goal.

Priority Setting

The most important theme of the strategic planning is to set priorities of the company as a whole, support functions as well as business lines. The priorities are set by the Broad for a particular time period. The port priorities are critical for minting focus as well as cohesion of the staffs and authority. The plan goals serve to apprise the mission and vision of the Port of Brisbane, strategic thinking as well as decision making, implementation of plans, maintenance of organizational culture.

• The port authority ensure focus on providing the excellent levels of the customer services as well as delivering the promises made to their stakeholders.
• The company maintains the reputation of a dependable organisation for developing long-term and sustainable relation with the shareholders. It invests its people as well as create strict control to facilitate the business growth through commercial management as an efficient as well as customer-focused port.

The company’s Trade Development team is responsible for providing opportunities as one-stop shop for trade as well as property enquiries, offering access to the integrated shipping along with trade expertise, marketing services and trade property development. This trade development team is committed to the customer services beside facilitating the trade solutions (Bichou, Bell and Evans 2013).

• The organization works with the new as well as existing customers and assist them with access to their services, facilities. Thus, it ensures that cargo is best served in the Brisbane port.
• The company policies help the customers in planning for the future capacity projects as well as facilitating a long term professional growth and property investment.
• The organization negotiates and manages the land tenure and provides strategic directions on the land uses within the business precincts.

Weaknesses

The biggest challenge for the Port of Brisbane is to create a long-term, well-organized and stable modal solution. this needs to be developed as well as it requires a strong support along with investment from both the government as well as industry. As the port has enough infrastructure connectivity for supporting trade for Brisbane along with the state, the challenge needs to be overcome.

Opportunities

The primary opportunity of the Port of Brisbane is their location (Pettit and Beresford 2017). The place where the port is situated is the fastest developing business and industry region in Queensland. It is one of the largest employment zone that has many advantages like-

• International road, air, sea and rail infrastructure connect the port’s businesses directly with their suppliers as well as customers (Moon and Woo 2014)
• The organization has a direct access to some major national as well as international business destinations
• It is located in an ideal location with Queensland’s fast growing population
• Dedicated industry precincts providing the opportunity to co-locate with complementary businesses
• The port has the Australian government recognition as most significant trade precinct of Queensland.
• It has access to the most important supply chains in key industries such as manufacturing, aviation, construction, logistics, building products and many more (Kilminster et al 2015).
• Quality certification is one of the chief recognitions that the port has achievedamong all the ports of Australia.
• The port authority introduces eco-efficiency that creates more goods along with services by using fewer resources. It is a business value for carting less waste and pollution (Prato 2017).

Threats

• The port of Brisbane has a high level of competition with the otherports in Australia. The sea route to Queensland has become busier in comparison to the other chief maritime routes due to development in trade and industries. Therefore, there is a strong competition among the ports of Australia (Lam and Notteboom2014).
• AbbotPoint, Bundaberg Port, Cairns Harbour,Hope Harbourand Port Clinton are the main competitor of the port of Brisbane. Bundaberg Port is the nearest port and works under the same authority but this port attracts more bulk traffic whereas Brisbane port stands out for container traffic (Linde, Wilson and Costantini 2017). The port therefore has a low percentage as the competitors steal its traffic clients as well as trading partners.
• The industry sector in Australia is marked by the companies constantly merging or acquiring other companies for gaining more power (Song and Parola2015). The new trend of strategic alliances and agreements among the client have affected the business of the port.

The Port of Brisbane needs to introduce more updated technology for evolving business demand. The IT management team needs to identify the most mature technology instead of those which have reached the end of their lifecycle. The typical scenarios include the need of modelling whether outsourcing or insourcing of the technology will be better for future forecasting demands of the business. The company has close business cooperation with associations and companies in the ceramics, citric and energy sector therefore the traffic can be increased in these section.

The important economic shift that is taking place in Asia as well as world, the demand for Australian agricultural products are fast increasing. For meeting this growing global demand, the Port of Brisbane needs to enhance its infrastructure so that agricultural exporters in our hinterland canhave dedicated access to market.

Conclusion

Therefore, it can be concluded that the port of Brisbane has different facilities as well as advantages for a successful business management. The internal and external factors have helped for its continuous growth. The location of the port is the most essential benefactor for its business. Despitethe fact that the competition in this sector is fast increasing, but so also the traffic. Therefore, with little advancement in the setup will be beneficial for the business. There are some issues regarding infrastructure and technology that needs to be improved so that the port can get more competitive advantages.

References

Alderton, P. and Saieva, G., 2013. Port management and operations. Taylor & Francis.

Benham, C.F., Beavis, S.G., Hendry, R.A. and Jackson, E.L., 2016. Growth effects of shading and sedimentation in two tropical seagrass species: Implications for port management and impact assessment. Marine pollution bulletin, 109(1), pp.461-470.

Bichou, K., Bell, M. and Evans, A., 2013. Risk management in port operations, logistics and supply chain security. CRC Press.

Caton, B. and Harvey, N., 2015. Coastal management in Australia (p. 342). University of Adelaide Press.

Cimpeanu, R., Devine, M.T. and O’Brien, C., 2017. A simulation model for the management and expansion of extended port terminal operations. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 98, pp.105-131.

Curtis, B., 2017. Channel optimisation and risk management through technology at the world’s largest bulk export port. Australasian Coasts & Ports 2017: Working with Nature, p.310.

Kilminster, K., McMahon, K., Waycott, M., Kendrick, G.A., Scanes, P., McKenzie, L., O’Brien, K.R., Lyons, M., Ferguson, A., Maxwell, P. and Glasby, T., 2015. Unravelling complexity in seagrass systems for management: Australia as a microcosm. Science of the Total Environment, 534, pp.97-109.

Lam, J.S.L. and Notteboom, T., 2014. The greening of ports: a comparison of port management tools used by leading ports in Asia and Europe. Transport Reviews, 34(2), pp.169-189.

Linde, M., Wilson, C. and Costantini, T., 2017. Technical assessment of the Port of Brisbane offsite stormwater management pilot. Australasian Coasts & Ports 2017: Working with Nature, p.736.

Moon, D.S.H. and Woo, J.K., 2014. The impact of port operations on efficient ship operation from both economic and environmental perspectives. Maritime Policy & Management, 41(5), pp.444-461.

Pettit, S. and Beresford, A. eds., 2017. Port Management: Cases in Port Geography, Operations and Policy. Kogan Page Publishers.

Prato, T., 2017. Using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis in Natural Resource Management. Routledge.

Song, D.W. and Parola, F., 2015. Strategising port logistics management and operations for value creation in global supply chains.

Woo, J.K. and Moon, D.S.H., 2014. The effects of slow steaming on the environmental performance in liner shipping. Maritime Policy & Management, 41(2), pp.176-191.