New York Container Terminal earned an A+ rating from an outside auditing firm for its control and maintenance of 288 widely divergent pieces of rolling equipment and parts inventory. The rating came after the same department had failed a similar audit in 2005. According to Charlie Priscu, the container facility’s manager of power equipment, the rating boost was due largely to the implementation of Dossier maintenance management software.
“We went from the bottom to the top in one year,” Priscu said.
New York Container Terminal (NYCT), a deep-water container facility on
187 acres on Staten Island in New York Harbor, transfers cargo containers between ships and surface transportation modes, including truck and rail. The customer-oriented company also consolidates small international shipments into container loads and operates a large food warehouse. Dossier is a maintenance management software developed and supported by Arsenault Associates.
Priscu is responsible for the maintenance and operation of an unusual array of rolling stock, including 75 switchers or yard hostlers, ninety 10,000-pound fork lifts, three 30,000-pound fork lifts, twenty-five 30-ton top-loaders, 10 so-called sidebars, 70 pickup trucks, 12 SUVs, 2 school buses (to ferry crew to and from ships) and one General Electric 2,000 hp diesel rail locomotive.
NYCT strives for excellence in all its operations, Priscu said, but when he came to the company in 2006, his department had first failed, then barely passed, the outside audit. The problem was in documentation and control of rolling assets and parts inventory. Previously NYCT had shopped for a solution solution and selected Dossier, but implementation had been very limited. It was only being used to create and track work orders. Priscu set about harnessing the power of Dossier to track inventory and establish a viable preventive maintenance program.
“The immediate payoff was in easy access to information, locating parts and accounting for assets. We have PMs on time now and we’re not missing things,” Priscu noted.
Dossier has helped NYCT cooperate with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to control air polluting emissions in the port.
“We use handheld computers with Dossier and record the fuel pumped to each piece of equipment; we compare that to the hours the equipment runs between fill-ups, so we have very accurate records of gallons per hour burned that validate our compliance with the Port Authority’s clean air program,” Priscu explained.
“If I’m saving fuel, I’m putting less hydrocarbons in the air,” he said.
Based on success in Priscu’s department, NYCT is in the process of implementing Dossier in another department which is responsible for the operation and maintenance of NYCT’s six quayside gantry cranes and four new post-Panamax cranes — giant, multi-faceted machines that actually lift containers between ship and shore.
