Empirical performance measurement of cargo handling equipment in Vietnam container terminals

Background: Cargo-handling equipment (CHE) plays a vital role in maintaining the efficiency of a highly-worked container terminal. Methods: This study is aimed to analyze the CHEs' performance, which is conducted based on a contextual application of the overall equipment-effectiveness (OEE) technique and data collected from a field survey in 14 container terminals in Vietnam. Results: The findings reveal that the CHEs are operated incompatibly with their actual capacity due to low performance. Also, the findings clarified the unproductive exploitation of container terminals and low actual terminal throughput since the capacity-designed terminals are currently operating above their actual capacity. Conclusions: The application of the OEE index for groups of CHE equipment is an origin for the impact assessment of the overall performance between the groups of CHEs' equipment, thereby proposing management tools for supporting the improvement of the CHEs and container terminals' performance in Vietnam.