Evaluating electronic port services for container terminals: the PPA case

The global crisis has made it more important than ever for container terminals to find ways to attract customers. In order to achieve this, a container terminal must apply a cost leadership strategy or differentiate its functions. The introduction of electronic port services offers greater productivity, reduced operational cost, and higher level of quality services. As the need to support agile container terminal operations with rapidly evolving and highly differentiated software applications emerges, robust, integrated and usable methodologies and tools, specialised in evaluating electronic services for container terminal operations are necessary. We propose a particular approach that combines the strategic fit, AHP, QFD and balanced scorecard techniques in order to evaluate the e-services to be adopted in a container terminal environment, using a variety of criteria covering technological, organisational and environmental dimensions. The paper presents the case study of the container terminal of Piraeus Port Authority (PPA) where the methodology has been applied to evaluate a number of selected electronic port services.