Port Victoria is considered as the maritime gateway to the Seychelles economy with 90% of all that is consumed in the country passing through it, and it is estimated that the port industry generates well over 1,500 jobs. Situated outside the Indian Ocean cyclonic zones, Port Victoria is a safe haven for all types of ships, including cruise ships, leisure mariners, yacht owners and military sailors.

 

In its drive to modernise port services, extend capacity, and improve service delivery, the Seychelles Port Authority (SPA) is implementing the Port Victoria Rehabilitation & Extension Project, and has concurrently embarked on the full-blown process of digitisation of its port operations through the implementation of the Port Victoria Management Information System (PVMIS).

 

Within this port modernisation framework, EU’s Africa RISE has launched a development project with a focus on the improvement of business services in Seychelles. The operations of SPA are largely manual, with information currently captured in logbooks, on paper forms and into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. As processes are not systematically formalised or fully documented, service delivery runs the risk of being inconsistent and leading to communication challenges, inefficiencies, and delays. 

 

Africa RISE is extending support to SPA for the re-engineering of its business processes. Formally incepted on the 1st of February 2023, the Africa RISE SEY-002 project was officially launched on the 27^th of March 2023, during a high-profile ceremony that was held at the SPA’s Conference Room.  Graced by the presence of Honourable Mr. Antony Derjacques, Minister for Transport, the event was attended by SPA’s Chairman and Board Members, the Principal Secretaries for the Department of Information Communication Technologies and Immigration, and a cohort of public and private sector business leaders.

 

In his welcoming address, Mr. Sonny Payet, the Chief Executive of SPA, pointed out that the project of documenting and digitalising the manually executed port management operations and administration has been waiting in the Seychelles Ports Authority’s Strategic Plan for over a decade. He reiterated that digitalising the port operations system is the way forward as it is aligned with the International Maritime Organisation’s prescription of single windows becoming operational worldwide by January 2024.

 

At Africa RISE, our objective is to improve the SPA’s service delivery capability by facilitating and easing the organisational transition from a largely manual operating model to business process readiness for operational digitalisation. The priority intervention area is the Cargo Community System. SPA has already hired a company (Infoport) to digitalise its port management operations once the same will have been reviewed and re-engineered by the Africa RISE team. The port activity digitalisation will proceed in phases that are sequenced to cover the Sea Facing system, the Cargo Community System, and eventually the Port Community system with the ultimate aim of switching on a Maritime Single Window by January 2024 in compliance with the IMO prescriptions.

 

Our team will be working to deliver a measurably more efficient set of business processes in SPA, by formalising, documenting, and re-engineering the existing ones, and introducing new ones where required to ensure the effective accomplishment of SPA’s mandate. The first 9-day mission taking place at the end of March and beginning of April 2023 was an activity- intensive process inventory and change management-focused high-ground of face-to-face project briefing and process mapping initiatives that enabled powerful internal and external stakeholder engagement with the multidisciplinary team working in full swing. Delivered in parallel, and separately targeting their respective profile-differentiated workgroups, the process mapping exercises mobilised just under 100 public and private sector business leadership and management participants while the multi-site change management briefings brought together wide-ranging cross-functional internal and external audiences that exceeded 100 participants. This was only made possible by the unfailing involvement of the SPA management in the organisation of the activities and the proactive communication lines they maintained with stakeholders.

 

A further objective is to embed a culture of continuous improvement in SPA, to get the organisation to continually review its performance, to adjust its procedures, processes and systems and to ensure that it always operates at optimum efficiency, delivering the highest service levels and value creation that can be generated on the strength of its resource base.  Hence our Africa RISE consultants will be leveraging our structured change management programme to embed SPA-wide acceptance and adoption of the eventual redesigned and/or streamlined business processes, and to prime the business and the mindsets for the projected advent of the IMO-prescribed single window.

 

Partners

 

About SPA  

The Seychelles Port Authority (SPA) was created in October 2004 under the Seychelles Ports Authority Act (2004) as a public commercial entity.   SPA is under the Ministry of Tourism, Civil Aviation, Port and Marine.  SPA manages over 1,663 nautical square miles of the Victoria Port limit. SPA’s principal activities includes the management of mooring and movement of vessels in and out of Port Victoria, the management of the main International Commercial Port (Mahé Quay), the Industrial Fishing Port and a network of domestic, inter- island jetties and terminals. 

 

About INFOPORT 

 

INFOPORT was created to federate the port operators and install a Cargo Community System in Réunion island. So, INFOPORT develop, operate and maintain the CCS SIMAR.

4 SH is an IT company specialized on the development of customized supply chain solution.

Once Again,  INFOPORT and 4SH will work together from the existing SIMAR Solution, to create and deploy a CCS adapted to the specificities of the Seychelles Ports Authority.