February 24 - In light of the new Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) regulation being implemented on July 1 2016, new German company Tally Tech has launched what it claims to be the first certifiable container weighing solution on the market.
The new SOLAS regulation determines that all containers loaded on a ship for export will have to be weighed in a verifiable and precise manner. Moreover, container weights must be securely and electronically communicated to the ship operator, so that the data can be integrated into the stowage planning.
The requirement aims to enhance safety for the container shipping sector, but the new regulation brings with it a number of logistics hurdles, since technical solutions to weigh containers and communicate this data are not commonplace in the market.
For this reason, Tally Tech has launched its own container weighing solution, which can be applied to both the container weighing methods defined by the International Maritime Organization (IMO): Method one involves a container being weighed with all of its contents already packed; while method two involves the contents being weighed and then added to the container tare weight.
Through an app, website and computer client, data from the weighing process can be automatically documented via Bluetooth and transferred to the shipping operator via Tally Tech's data centre, states the company.
Tally Tech has partnered with manufacturers, such as FSH and CES, so that weight notes can be recorded directly during the weighing process via reach stacker, crane, or sensors that can be installed onto the twist locks of truck chassis.
For weighing processes using method two, Tally Tech has cooperated with Dutch manufacturer RAVAS, enabling weight notes to be directly recorded while loading goods into a container using a forklift.
With both weighing methods, Tally Tech explained that data is automatically recorded to minimise the margin of error. After being recorded in the Tally Tech app, the data is transferred to the company's data centre via SSL protocol, before being recoded into a format used by the respective shipping operator. A digital acknowledgment is also automatically provided to the consignor, said Tally Tech.
www.tally-tech.com
