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An 8,000-tonne Automatic Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS) at Chennai airport is expected to speed up cargo clearance and drive volumes. But freight forwarders and industry representatives are sceptical as glitches in the system prevent full capacity utilisation.
Chennai airport now has the largest ASRS system, fully automated and capable of storing and retrieving tonnes of cargo in a matter of minutes, a process that would have taken hours if done manually.
At the cargo terminal, it is just past lunch and and workers are busy loading cargo. Inside the terminal, 17-m tall ASRS and four automated horizontal carousels move on a circular track with cargo bins sorting the cargo.
Once the import cargo is received from the aircraft, it is stored in 1.3-tonne capacity ASRS bin. An operator keys the bin number and the carton’s barcode and specifies the cell’s location for storage. The carousel picks up the bin and stops at an aisle where a fixed-aisle stacker crane takes the bin to the vertical storage system and places the bin with the cargo in the designated cell. The process is reversed to retrieve the cargo. All this happens in a few minutes as against hours, said an employee at the terminal.
In April, the ASRS, costing Rs 45 crore, was installed by Godrej Efacec Automation & Robotics Ltd, a joint venture between Godrej & Boyce Mfg and Portugal’s Efacec Automacao e Robotica.
A pilot went on till August and the system is now fully operational.
There is no human intervention thus eliminating unsafe handling practices, misplacement of cargo, theft and pilferage, said a senior airport official.
“We hope more cargo will come to Chennai,” said a senior AAI official. The AAI offers 72 hours of storage, after which demurrage is claimed from the consignee.
Industry sceptical
G. Raghu Shankar, Chairman, Shipping Committee, Southern India Chamber of Commerce and Industry, says ASRS is ideal to handle homogeneous cargo while in Chennai it is mostly heterogeneous. This means, only around 20 per cent of cargo can be stored in ASRS, leading to under-utilisation of the system.
From a monthly handling of about 29,000 tonnes of import/ export cargo two years ago, the volume has declined to 19,000 tonnes of which nearly one third is import. Nearly 2,000 tonnes is cleared as full pallets without requiring ASRS and the balance 4,500 tonne comprises 8,000 packages. Out of this only around 2,500 enjoy ASRS facility and the rest are stored in the open as they do not fit in to the bins, he said.
In other words, of the 8,000 bins in ASRS only 2,500 are being utilised. With the current slowdown, it will be a while before all the bins get filled up.
“There is lack of proper warehouse management of the system as nobody understands how the cargo industry works here,” he said.
According to J. Krishnan of Natesa Iyer & Co, a freight forwarding company, the success of ASRS will depend up on the last-mile issue. It takes lot of time to get delivery of the cargo. Also, there is a manual intervention in delivery, which affects the flow of cargo.
The performance of ASRS at Chennai does not measure up to the efficiencies of similar systems at airports in Hong Kong or Singapore.
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