From the course: Supply Chain Foundations (2014)
Standard containers
- The standardized container, eight feet across, eight and a half feet high, and either 20 or 40 feet in length. To most, just a big metal box, but to those that understand supply chain management, it's perhaps one of the most important inventions of the 1900s. Why? Well, before the standardized container, how did cargo move around the world? Boxes and crates, thousands of boxes and crates, moved by hand from warehouse to truck, moved again by hand from truck to ship, when yet again they'd be unloaded by hand on to another truck. Each box touched dozens of times in transit. Every time it was touched another chance for the box to get lost, broken, or stolen. Back then supply chains were slow and quite unreliable, then comes along the standardized container, and suddenly the world of supply chain becomes faster and safer for your cargo. How? Well, these big metal boxes are sort of the Legos of the shipping world, they fit almost anywhere in the logistics world. Once filled, they can be sealed up and then loaded on to a truck chassis. When the truck gets to the rail yard, it can be lifted on to a rail car. When that rail car crosses the country, it can be quickly loaded on to another truck, from the truck it is lifted on to a ship and stacked with thousands of other containers to cross the ocean. It arrives in a far off country and again just as easily as in the origin country, that container fits on to another truck, and then it's driven to the final destination where for the first time since it was packed, the container is opened. Ever wonder how those beautiful and exotic imported fruits and vegetables get to your grocery store? Well, there are even more magical containers called controlled atmosphere containers. Believe it or not everyone just calls them reefers. I'm serious, reefers. Why reefers? Because they're refrigerated but they are so much more than refrigerated. These glorious modern 20 and 40 foot reefers, they can control temperature, humidity, they can even eliminate oxygen and harmful gases. No oxygen, bye bye bugs, bye bye bacteria. How do we keep track of millions of containers on earth? Well, since there are 20-footers and 40-footers, the industry measures them in TEUs, Twenty-Foot Equivalent units. One 20-footer equals one TEU, one 40-footer equals two TEUs, it's how companies measure cargo. We exported 400 TEUs last year. It's how ships are measured, that's a 5,000 TEU ship. Big ship actually nowadays there are ships in excess of 15,000 TEUs, and it's how ports measure their annual business. Last year five million TEUs passed through this port. Again, sound like a big number, but a few Asian ports handle routinely over 25 million TEUs per year. To some of you this idea of standardized containers is brand new. If it is, next time you go to a store know that most of the imported items on the shelf probably spent days if not weeks in one of those standardized containers. A dark and lonely trip, perhaps, but a faster and safer trip than what was available in the 1930s. And for those of you that live near an ocean port, or if you see standardized containers stacked all around your town, perhaps you'll wonder where did they all come from? How long did it take them to get here? What are they carrying? How many countries have they visited? How many people are served by each container and the goods it carries? And just maybe you'll pause and appreciate how these containers have changed the world.
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