Customer
Located on the busiest maritime traffic strait in the world for international shipping, the Port of Calais together with the Port of London handle one third of all seafaring cargo passing between continental Europe and the British Isles. In 2014, nearly 11 million passengers used the port facilities. Freight tonnage traffic passing through Calais exceeded 43 million tonnes and broke the previous year’s record.
Challenge
The Port of Calais renovated its coordination centre in 2015 in order to improve its overall quality of service. The centre is responsible for the coordination of information between all the various stakeholders at the port; shipping companies, security services, operations, French and English customs, border police, travellers, etc. The centre manages multiple IT platforms such as those for job information, paid parking lots, billboards for travellers, various digital signage, road traffic control, AIS (Automatic Identification System), and more.
Teams of three agents each work in shifts around the clock, as the port operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year. The working environment consists of multiple com puter systems with varying operating systems, a wide variety of screens as well as digital and analogue cameras. As the number of managed systems has increased significantly in recent years, not enough attention had been paid to optimising ergonomics. The centre had a multitude of screens of different sizes, a variety of interfaces, WEYTEC distributionPLATFORM unlike keyboards and desks, and lots of local computers generating ambient noise and heat.
The Port of Calais went out to bid in 2014 and requested a technical solution to optimize, modernize and simplify work-flows for their agents, all within a limited budget.