The changing nature of cargo container handling needs information sharing as a key performance indicator

The growth in world trade is doubling every 5–7 years with a corresponding increase in cargo container movements most of which are handled by seaports. Moving more traffic through the limited area of a seaport can only be achieved by an increase in port performance. Ship owners, terminal operators and forwarding agents each have optimized their performance guided by values collected on key performance indicators. However, our results from a case study at Oslo port shows that operations suffer from insufficient information sharing resulting in an unused integration potential which not captured by the current performance indicators. We propose a new Information Sharing Indicator calculated as the sum of zero/one variables showing whether electronic information sharing between actors is shared (1) or not shared (0), plus with a value metric measuring the level of the information shared on a scale from 1 (lowest) to 3 (highest). We propose to extend the multi-dimensional port performance measurement framework commonly used by ports by extending it with the Information Sharing Indicator.