Shipping lines have decided not to wait for the timelines or inertia of the public administration in the Canary Islands. Faced with recurring bureaucratic paralysis and the inability of port management to swiftly coordinate heavy-vehicle traffic in island port service areas, Boluda Shipping has opted to take drastic action. The maritime multinational has opened its chequebook to commit an investment of more than €40 million, devoted entirely to modernizing its BMT terminal at the Port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The centerpiece of this financial deployment is a mobile digital platform conceived as a technological spearhead to clear access to the facility and prevent the logistics chain from being choked.
The strategic move responds to the pressing need to ease bottlenecks in land-based infrastructure whenever a new-generation large container ship docks. The daily operations of the so-called Ultra Large Container Vessels (ULCVs) subject the quays to extreme activity peaks, concentrating the movement of hundreds of trucks seeking to deliver or collect cargo into very narrow time windows. Developed in partnership with industrial and port automation specialist TMEIC, the tool, called Pulse Mobile, allows operational verification to be shifted to the digital space in advance, requiring data management to be completed before heavy vehicles physically reach the terminal’s vicinity.
The platform’s operations cover the entire logistics workflow from the moment transport companies receive a loading or unloading order. Through the mobile application, hauliers complete the validation of operational information, permit management and resolution of potential incidents before setting their vehicles in motion. The company’s calculations indicate that this preliminary filter will allow up to 80% of documentation problems and access-related incidents to be neutralized at an early stage, preventing trucks from becoming stranded at the terminal gates, blocking traffic and increasing transport companies’ operating costs.
Platform
Once the pilot experience at BMT Tenerife has been consolidated and validated, Boluda Shipping’s roadmap calls for extending this access-control system to all nine of its maritime terminals. The technology will therefore be progressively deployed at the group’s other four facilities in the Canary Islands and its remaining four facilities on the Iberian Peninsula. The platform will be fully integrated with Terminal Operating Systems (TOS) and Port Community Systems (PCS), making it possible to permanently eliminate the use of physical paper documents, improve transport traceability and maintain a real-time, digitized and tamper-proof record of every transaction.
Statements by the senior executives involved in the project highlight the gap in speed separating private-sector initiative from institutional management on the islands. BMT Chief Executive Gonzalo Calero Gómez described the investment as a structural component in the transition toward hyperconnected facilities focused on end-user efficiency. For his part, TMEIC Managing Director Francisco Grau placed the agreement in the context of a global turning point in which digital transformation and the intensive use of data determine the competitive survival of international maritime hubs.
The technological deployment at the Tenerife terminal exposes the shortcomings of public planning in the archipelago. While private operators are being forced to finance, with tens of millions of euros, algorithmic tools to patch up traffic chaos at access points and absorb pressure from demand peaks, regional port policy remains bogged down in administrative sluggishness and a lack of an integrated transport vision. In a hypercompetitive maritime environment, the difference between an efficient port and a saturated facility is defined by the companies willing to invest where island bureaucracy cannot reach.
The article “Praying to God—and putting up €40 million: Boluda reinforces Tenerife port as bureaucracy lies becalmed” was first published on canarymaritime.com.
