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CHANGE IS A CHALLENGE SOFTWARE • EXIS TECHNOLOGIES HAS ITS ROOTS IN THE HCB OF THE 1980S. IT HAS GROWN THROUGH A PERIOD OF INNOVATION AND A MASSIVE CHANGE IN SCALE REWIND TO 1987 and please stay with this! You need to ship 400 litres of Grignard solution from Hamburg to Singapore. You know it’s hazardous so you try the IMDG Code general index. Page 10122 tells you it is UN 1928, class 4.3, packing group I and a flammable liquid. The schedule page is 4355-1. If it hadn’t been listed by name you would have looked in the UN Orange Book to see if it met any of the hazard class definitions, what the packing group was, and picked the appropriate generic or N.O.S. UN Number.
The schedule page tells you it is UN 1928, METHYLMAGNESIUM BROMIDE, IN ETHYL ETHER. The chemical formula is CH³MgBr, which is useful only to a chemist wanting to confirm the identity of it. It will be a colourless, yellowish liquid which decomposes violently in contact with water. Spillage will ignite spontaneously so helpfully it says to refuse shipment in damaged or leaking receptacles. The packaging choices are listed on the schedule page itself rather than in a table used by many class 4.3 substances. You pick 1-litre
glass receptacles, each sealed in a metal can and then packed together in a 4D plywood box. They are limited to 125 kg gross so you will need several of them. The DG declaration is completed and everything has been collected by the forwarding agent. This is LCL (less than container load) so the consolidator uses his IMDG Code to check compatibility with other items in the container, which is then booked with the carrier, whose DG department now checks the shipment against the IMDG Code, their own rules, segregation onboard and ship restrictions. This process is pretty much the same as today but in 1987 it involved the use of books, telephone, telex and fax, the latest technology. The ship is 2,000 teu and the whole movement takes a typical six weeks with too many hours of administration that is prone to error. LEVERAGE TECHNOLOGY This was the start point for Exis; an environment of long-established manual procedures and increasing DG incidents driving international implementation of the IMDG Code (for example the fire that destroyed the dry cargo ship Poona in Gothenburg in 1971, involving sodium chlorate and rapeseed oil).Information technology is developing and the arrival of commercial internet (or world wide web) is imminent. Some lines, notably Hapag Lloyd, have implemented in-house computerised DG systems, mostly replicating but speeding up their manual procedures. There is no industry-wide computer system or standards. The first Exis products of the late 1980s and early 1990s were basic lookup tools for the international multimodal regulations, speeding up the booking process. They ran on customers’ servers and the early PCs, plus a clunky dial-up service. During the 1990s Exis focused on sea transport, building on its ‘Computerised IMDG Code’. Operators needed fast ‘yes/no’ answers to DG questions without laborious reference searches. This was the platform on which the Hazcheck family was built, tools for each link in the transport chain that simplified classification, packaging, segregation, stowage and documentation.
HCB MONTHLY | JULY 2020
