What bathtubs can teach us about supply chain bottlenecks:
that the Port of Charleston, South Carolina has a queue of 31 ships waiting to unload highlights a bottleneck that has thrown supply chains into turmoil over the last two years. Container terminals, especially those in the ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach but now increasingly East Coast ports, have received a lot of attention because they have been overwhelmed by import volumes. One way to understand the struggles that the terminal operators face is to use the analogy of a bathtub.
Imagine you have a standard bathtub – which typically holds 80 gallons of water – and you have a faucet that is filling it and a drain that empties it. One thing you don’t want to do is fill it past the top . If the drain is wide open, you can bring pour water in on average as fast as it drains out. If the drain gets clogged, you may have to fill it slower or pause occasionally so that you don’t overflow the tub rim.
Container terminals have yards, and those yards are their buffers. They unload import containers from ships into the yard stack, where they wait to get picked up by truckers, or get put on intermodal trains. Like a bathtub, the drain rate is governed by how fast you can get truckers in, matched to the containers they are supposed to pick up, and out.
Meanwhile if the destination for your container, say it’s a distribution center, is overcrowded or full, that means you don’t have anywhere to take it. That corresponds to clogging the drain of your bathtub. What many shippers do is they leave the container in the yard and delay picking it up. Leave the water in the tub since the drain is clogged. But now the tub is filled to overflowing, so you have to stop the water that’s still coming in.
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