Communication system at SBAB

Abstract: This report for the bachelor's degree is designed to present the work and results carried out on Bottenvikens Stuveri AB , BSAB, in Piteå. The work was conducted in spring 2012 in collaboration with Anton Klava. BSAB is already aware of their long delays for incoming trucks and asked us to make it more effective. Delays refers to the time from a truck announces arrival at the port until the truck is assigned a offload location. This time should not normally exceed 5 minutes, but sometimes have attained 60 minutes. The reason for the long delays may be due to the current system used for notifcation between a truck and the forklift driver. For the forklift driver to gain knowledge of arrived trucks it requires that the driver monitors the computer inside the forklift. If the driver is not present to monitor the computer, delays can be very long. A solution to this problem was carried out by implementing a SMS service where the forklift driver receives a SMS for each truck arrived. The driver is then freed from monitoring the computer inside the forklift. The implementation also allowed the forklift driver to reply an SMS containing the offload location. In an attempt to reduce waiting times further, there was a possibility for trucks to pre-register their arrival. This test is mainly for evaluation purposes to see if it's worth continuing with pre-registration. SMS service became very popular in Piteå and is constantly used by the forklift drivers. According to them self the SMS service is more reliable than the computer system. Because of the very few trucks that pre-registered its arrival, it is diffcult to show results on it. However, the truck drivers admit it might be pleasant to know when a truck arrives, but that it is not worth the extra work required. The result should be seen as successful and BSAB is pleased with the work.