General Prescriptive System for Smart KPI Management: Application in Container Terminal Operations

Maritime containerized cargo, while comprising a modest share of global trade by volume, represents a substantial portion by value. highlighting the need for efficient port operations. This paper presents SIMK – Smart Impact Management of KPIs, a novel prescriptive analytics system designed to support proactive, data-driven decision-making in container terminal operations. Developed within the Portuguese NEXUS Agenda but inherently data-agnostic and modular, SIMK integrates quantitative variables from any dataset into a hierarchical framework of KPIs, dimensions, and deviations. The system combines time-series forecasting, training over 20 machine learning models, with scenario-based modeling and optimization to recommend variable adjustments under realistic operational constraints. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first prescriptive framework that explicitly incorporates management change capability, process inertia, and competitive context into a mathematically structured model. A real-world application at the Port of Sines demonstrates the system’s practical relevance. Beyond logistics, SIMK offers a replicable model adaptable to diverse industrial environments, e.g., manufacturing or healthcare.