Operations Expert - Excellence is All in a Day's Work

APL’s Operations Supervisor in Mexico City, Victor Mendoza, has a solution for almost everything. If there’s a way of getting a customer’s cargo on the vessel, he’ll find it.

Victor is someone who knows the saying, ‘A miss is as good as a mile’. In this case, it is 530 miles, with size 20-foot containers destined for the port of Manzanillo, but stranded at a rail terminal outside Mexico City.

Without a specialized railcar to accept 20-footers, the shipment will miss the stacktrain service heading south – and miss the vessel sailing. Worse, the six boxes are part of a 28-container shipment moving under the same booking – so if the 20-footers don’t make the train, the other containers won’t either.

The standard solution – repositioning the needed railcars during the course of normal operations – will take time. In fact, too much time. With options fast running out, there is only one thing to do. Victor decides to rent a locomotive to bring the required railcar to the terminal. The boxes are lifted onto the special car, make it out the gate on time aboard the stacktrain, and are connected with the liner service to Asia.

For Victor, it is just another day in APL operations, where creative problem-solving is a basic requirement. Some days, it’s just plain perseverance that counts.

In another instance of ‘beating the clock’, Mexican terminal officials are holding up a shipment that has to be delivered on the same day or the customer risks losing the sale.

Victor goes to the terminal office, waits two hours to be seen, then presses the case with the authorities, shuttling from desk to desk to convince each person involved. When he ultimately succeeds, it is into the evening, and the container yard is about to close. But Victor refuses to concede defeat. He persists and persuades the management to keep the office open until the customs officer clears the container. The cargo reaches its customer on time.

“Operations in Mexico are very complicated,” Victor says. “Every day, we face different situations. You just have to understand the issues and get them resolved. Our customers have a lot of confidence in our ability to move their cargo effectively. And we don’t want to let them down.”

Coupled with our technology and know-how, an exemplary can-do attitude among our staff around the world, our operations are among the most reliable and efficient in the industry. It is not surprising that our customers entrust more than two million containers to us every year.