CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

          Nigeria Ports Authority is a government owned organization under the supervision of the federal Ministry of transport with responsibility of providing specific ports and labor services for the country’s meantime industry.

          One of their numerous duties and major functions is the provision of Cargo Handling Quays facilities. Right from the inception of this company, the billing system has been manually processed.  The port complex is in the early stage of computerization and the manual method of preparing customers’ bills are delayed.

          A computer-based billing system is necessary for handling and preparing of accurate bills for customers.  The new system will facilitate the prompt preparation of bills, easy retrieval of information, security to vital information and resource sharing among the billing department.

1.1 BACKGROUND OF STUDY:

Once Port complex is located near Port Harcourt, Rivers State of Nigeria, the port is a natural port and was established about twenty years ago, firstly with the construction and commissioning of the Federal Lighter Terminal (FLT) in 1982 and later the Federal Ocean Terminal (FOT) in 1996.

These two terminals handle lighter (smaller) vessels and ocean-going vessels respectively.  The average draught of FLT is about 5.7m while that of FOT is about 13.0m being the cheapest in the West and Central African sub-region.  In this regard, the FOT is envisaged to be attiacting more cargo ship and traffic not only as a transit but also as a transshipment center in the sub-region.  It however did not have any mechanical handling equipment for billing.

The billing system is presently handling manually by the marketing department of this port.  The marketing department of the port took over the function of revenue billing from the traffic department in the 80’s.  Their main function is to raise customer’s bills of all statutory charges against port users for the services rendered to them.  These services includes Rental period at the number of days the consignment in within the port vicinity, NPA shore handling, transfer service, documentation, terminal delivery value added tax (VAT) and miscellaneous.

The role at which the bills are prepared with the increasing number of customer is insignificant.  There are procedural ways in which these bills are being prepared.  They are the provisional bills of vessels, the final bills of vessels and the miscellaneous bills.  A staff has to raise as many bills as the number of the customer increases: more importantly, delays bring extra cost on the importer, and this makes the importer feel disappointed when they come to collect their raised bills.

Hence, a thorough investigation and analysis of the manual billing method enables me to gain understanding on the true nature of their problems and design a computerized seaport billing system that would bring solutions to the problem inherent.

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