Improving Service Efficiency of a Container yard through Simulation Modeling

This article focuses on the improvement of service efficiency for the container yard of the case-study company in Thailand. We aim to reduce the time in the system for all the serviced trucks. At present, a tractor truck takes an average of more than 30 minutes to obtain service within the container yard, resulting in low satisfaction levels. Therefore, the approach for improving service efficiency has been studied and developed appropriately. Through a simulation the operations within the yard have been modeled, and used to analyze the service processes, as well as being used to determine different scenarios for improving services, such as adjusting service methods, increasing/decreasing the number of employees, and adding resources etc. In the research, five scenarios have been proposed and developed with discrete-event simulation (DES), and all scenarios are run repeatedly to compare with the current practice. After all experiments were conducted, it was found that Scenario 5 was the best scenario as the tractor truck driver did not have to get off his vehicle to make a document and payment, by increasing the number of staff to be six persons, and the increasing the number of service channels to be six channels at the In Gate. There was integration of the document process and the payment process at the same point by one staff member, so it reduced the waiting time for getting service. In addition, this scenario does not cause waiting at the Out Gate for a truck returning containers, due to one of the increased six channels being set as a special exit for coming to return containers. The whole results from the simulation model show that the time in system of the hauling truck that comes to pick up or drop off containers within the container yard of the case-study company has reduced to 20.9 minutes on average.