Transformation and innovation of modern ports in South Africa

The month-long Huawei Connect “Dive into Digital” Summit Series went on with the Transport Week edition being held at the Huawei Office Park.
The summit looked at how Artificial Intelligence, 5G and the Huawei Cloud to create a more efficient and integrated transport system.
This is in line with Huawei’s vision to bring digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected and integrated world.
This goes hand in hand with South Africa’s Digital Transformation plan to ensure we can positively affect our economy in the fourth industrial revolution.
Ms. Rose Moyo, Senior ICT Specialist at Huawei Enterprise took to the stage to discuss Huawei’s Smart Port Digital Transformation Practice.
In her speech, she discussed how using Huawei products and solutions can improve the efficiency of our ports and have a direct and positive impact on our GDP.
South Africa’s geographic placement is very strategic and has been leveraged on for sea travel, and trading for decades – dating as far back as the 1800s.
For us to take full advantage of this and grow our economy it is important to satisfy the three dimensions of digitally transforming our ports.
The first dimension is operational automation; this can be done through unmanned driving, self-service check-in and smart unattended container terminals – to name a few.
By automating, we take away the possibility of human error due to multiple factors like exhaustion and lack of attention.
This also ensures safety because there are fewer opportunities for injuries in the workplace.
The second dimension is work and service mobility; If there is one thing this pandemic has taught us, it is that we can work from home and be just as, if not more, productive.
Through service mobility, users can perform mobile ticket booking, mobile site inspection, and even have a mobile office where they can perform their duties.
This will lead to greater efficiency because challenges presented by physical locations like national lockdowns can be avoided.
The final dimension is service visualization; as the name implies, this is having eyes on the goods at every point of its journey from the port to the destination.
This can be achieved by using IoT technologies to manage network-wide rail resources and to track the vehicle location and running status promptly.
Also, packages at important links in logistics processes, and the status and location of logistics warehouses/spare parts, as well as trucks and drivers, are also visualized.
These three dimensions, of course, cannot do all this on their own.
Huawei’s highspeed 5G will power the operations while the Huawei Cloud provides support for all the functions that need to be memorized and actioned remotely or automatically through Artificial Intelligence.
Huawei is not just all talk and no action as they currently provide solutions to over 100 000 KM of rail, 110 000KM of road, 50 airports, 20 seaports and 15 airlines worldwide.
Following the presentations, Ms. Moyo took the attendees on a tour of Huawei’s exhibition room where she explained various products and what they can do.
The most impressive product when it comes to seaports was the “Rapid” which can be assembled in 15 minutes and used on rescue missions on boats for example.
She also showed them the compact data center product Huawei offers which saves organizations the time and money they would have used to set big data centers up.
Click here to learn more about Huawei’s Smart Transportation
By Sphumelele Ndlovu