Martin: "our future depends on the decisions we take as a country in terms of energy and digital transition".
The president of the Port Authority has inaugurated this morning a meeting on the digital transformation of ports within the UIMP Port Week.
Santander 07/09/2022. The president of the APS, Francisco Martín, has pointed out this morning that the future and the survival of the system depends, to a large extent, on "the decisions we take as a country" in energy but also digital matters. Martín focused on ports and stressed that their optimization and survival "no longer depends so much on civil engineering as on data engineering". Thus, he explained that artificial intelligence is "essential" to provide operators with the resources they require to offer the best service to their customers and that efficiency in times, port operations and traceability of goods "can only be achieved by jumping on the bandwagon of new technologies".
The maximum leader of the port has made these reflections in the Palacio de la Magdalena in Santander during the opening of the meeting of the UIMP 'The Digital Transformation of Ports: New technologies, new ways of thinking and acting', where in addition to Martin have participated the director of the APS, Santiago Diaz Fraile; the general director of industry, Daniel Alvear Portilla; the technical director of NextPort, Oscar Pernia and the rector of the UIMP, Carlos Andradas.
The general director of industry, meanwhile, stressed that the port is "an indispensable partner of the Cantabrian industry" for which, "as an economic entity", digitization "is a tool for competitiveness without which it could not survive".
Likewise, the port director has assured that digital transformation is "inevitable" and has made a review of the change that port infrastructures have undergone since the approval of the Ports Law "that boosted the physical infrastructure" to various legal reforms that tried to "make these facilities more competitive". For Santiago Díaz Fraile, "additional regulations that promote infostructure to make better use of the infrastructures already installed in the ports" are still to come.
The meeting aims, under the direction of Santiago Díaz Fraile, director of APS and Óscar Pernía, founding partner and technical director of Next-Port, to explore, reflect and discuss some of the key axes around which the design, planning and implementation of digital transformation strategies in ports revolves. In this way, it is intended to give continuity to the one held last year under the title Exponential Technologies and their Impact on Ports and their Logistics Chains.
The content of this course, which has counted with the collaboration of Next-Port, is being developed along three areas entitled The Technological Architecture for Digital Transformation, Investing in Talent and Digital Transformation Strategies.
To conclude the UIMP Port Week, the VI Meeting on Port and Maritime Law will take place tomorrow 8th and Friday 9th, organized by the International Association of Port Law and the UIMP, with the collaboration of the State Ports Agency, the Port Authority of Santander and the Spanish Association of Maritime Law, and directed by José Antonio Morillo-Velarde del Peso, head of the legal department of Puertos del Estado and Fernando Bárcena Ruíz, lawyer and president of the International Association of Port Law. The objective of the course will be to analyze the different aspects that make up the legal framework that regulates and harmonizes port and maritime activities and practices.
The contents will be structured around seven topics that will act as axes of analysis, reflection, dialogue and debate and will address the following issues: the standard specifications of port services, price revisions in government contracts, competition law and public procurement, the case of landfills in the port of Marin, the reform of the Law of State Ports and Merchant Marine, the legal consequences of port congestion and the right to double instance in administrative law sanctioning.