Analytics for Decision Making at Ports

Ports serve as an important link in global supply chain. Worldwide more than 75 percent of cargo move by sea. Over the years, the Indian Union has endeavoured to invest on major ports of the country to meet up to the global standards. Yet the share of major ports under the government of India has decrease from 90 to 70 percentage of total sea borne cargo in the country. The major ports lost its share to the minor ports under the state governments. Two reasons could be hypothesized for the said problem. One, the investments are not made in the right direction and other that the efficiency needs to be improved in functioning of the ports. In this paper an attempt has been made to identify the dimensions of port performance and the causality between the dimensions. It chooses to take average turn round time (ATRT) as an indicator of port performance. The paper proposes an analytical framework to identify the causality that would aid the decision makers. The causal approach has been based on identifying the dimensions (factors) using multi-variate data analysis, establishing the linear causal association between the ATRT and the factors, analyzing the relationship so obtained to propose an System Dynamics model for policy simulation by the decision makers.