Mundra CFS: The new gateway of India

Mundra CFS is the new gateway to India Allcargo’s state-of-the-art 16-acre facility is the preferred container hold at the country’s largest private port

With a capacity of 74,000 TEU per annum and located just 4km from Mundra port, Allcargo’s Mundra Container Freight Station has emerged as the preferred gateway for shipping lines, leading freight forwarders and customs brokers. Spread across a sprawling 16 acre, the state-of-the-art Mundra facility is counted among Allcargo’s — and India’s —finest container freight stations (CFS).

Advantage Mundra

Even as other major ports like Mumbai and Chennai face operational and infrastructural hurdles, Mundra is the only port in India to have consistently registered double-digit growth over the past few years; its throughput is expected to pip Nhava Sheva Container Terminals this year. The port has state-of-the-art infrastructure, with smooth, traffic- free roads offering effortless access. ”In recent years, all the liners are focusing on Mundra port because of the faster service and quick turnaround time of their vessels,” says Lalitendu Mohanty, general manager, Mundra CFS, adding that the Allcargo CFS at Mundra is working to full capacity, contributing almost 20 per cent to the organisation’s CFS business while maintaining a healthy bottom-line.

Tech specs

Keeping with Allcargo’s emphasis on deploying cutting-edge technologies and systems to ensure best-in-class customer service, the Mundra CFS has deployed RFID-enabled tracking of containers in its yard, auto-generated reports to customers, SMS and mobile apps to track gate-in / out, kiosk at the documentation centre to help customers with the status of each container, adequate container handling equipment to ensure zero downtime and crawler- mounted hydraulic excavator with grab as attachment for extremely fast loading of metal scrap.

Benchmarked against the best facilities in the world, the Mundra CFS has high standards of compliance, having ISO & OHSAS certification, AEO certification and CT-PAT compliance. While enhanced CCTV coverage and PA system cover the entire facility for better control of safety and security, the bi-annual customer satisfaction surveys and regular monitoring of vendors’ performance through SMART KPIs ensures continuous improvement of processes — and the resultant customer delight. To instill a robust culture of safety, each employee and vendor undergoes a mandatory fire drill and safety training every month.

Customer first

At Allcargo Mundra, the customer is truly the king, as customer-centricity is integral to all functions. The sustained focus on customer relationship management has resulted in increasing throughput with each passing year, with all the major liners relying on Allcargo Mundra for their imports. With record throughputs (in TEU) in December 2017 and March 2018, the unit has demonstrated that it is ready for bigger challenges in the future. ”We are the only CFS that conducts annual customer satisfaction surveys to source customer feedback and then work towards improvement, besides regularly monitoring the performance of vendors through SMART KPIs,” says Mr Mohanty, adding that each employee is extensively trained to be customer-oriented. Some of the key customers of Mundra CFS include, among others, Maersk, MSC, COSCO, ZIM / Star, Yang Ming, OOCL, Emirates, Evergreen, ONE, RCL, Wan Hai, Cargo Seatrade, Velji Dosabhai & Sons, Liladhar Pasoo, S. Ramdas Pragji, Divya Shipping and DBC & Sons (Gujarat).

While waste paper, ferrous and non-ferrous scrap, wooden logs, bitumen, stone blocks and machineries for ceramic industries are the major commodities on the import side, the key export commodities handled at the Allcargo CFS in Mundra include rice, raw cotton bales, guar gum, groundnuts nuts, sesame seeds, extraction of oil mills and stones.

Future focused

Keeping the growing demand and the immense potential for growth, efforts are underway at the Mundra CFS to make it future-ready. From increasing the warehouse and yard capacities, and optimising the consumption of diesel, to introducing hand-held terminals for real-time update of tallies through operations software and implementing eco-friendly measures to conserve resources, a 360-degree initiative, powered by technology and Allcargo’s global competence, is being executed at this key CFS.