Athens 2004 organizers come to grips with the nitty-gritty
Athens 2004, the organizers of the Olympic Games, is preparing for the country’s biggest and most complex peacetime logistics project. Tenders will soon be issued for the hiring of two or three logistics companies and the freight forwarding agent. Officials of Athens 2004 say one of the most important issues is the finding of storage space; the Olympic Supply Center alone requires 80,000 square meters of such space which the organizers have already set out to procure from the private and public sector. Given the difficulty of finding this space, it is considered certain that a number of buildings will be used. Athens 2004 Logistics Director Apostolos Tzimourtas said recently that efforts are being made for the signing of the relevant contracts by September. The task at hand is huge. Based on the Sydney experience, the volume of the equipment to be transported is estimated to exceed 70,000 cubic meters, with 2,400 journeys to supply 68 sports and other installations, not counting test events. The international freight forwarding contractor at Sydney handled about 2,500 containers for national Olympic committees, journalists and media organizations. It is estimated that the organization of international forwarding will require about 100 employees, with the largest volume of materials being moved in the first half of 2004. In addition, more than 150 people will work at the Olympic Supply Center which will be used for the items and equipment of Athens 2004 and the sponsors. It is estimated it will host about 2,500 different codes of sports equipment materials, about 300 codes of technological equipment, furniture, utensils, pharmaceutical and medical equipment and materials for torch relay runs. The size of the task can also be deduced from the requirements of the sponsors: Panasonic, for instance, will need 10,000 square meters, Kodak about 1,500, Xerox about 8,000 and Swatch 2,000. In Sydney, all accredited transport vehicles made about 15,000 journeys, while the transportation of computers required more than 100 containers. The storage requirements of Athens 2004 will go on increasing in the second quarter of the Olympic year. Considerable investment is foreseen in technology in order to connect the storage area systems with the central system of Athens 2004 and for the application of a special security system for the vehicles entering and exiting facilities; the vehicles themselves will possess particular security specifications. According to S. Andrianopoulos, of the company Planning which is advising Athens 2004, different logistics models were used in previous Olympiads; Atlanta and Salt Lake set up their own management mechanisms; in Sydney, they outsourced a large number of services and the organizers found the storage areas and collaborated with a logistics company only for the purposes of managing the personnel working there. Athens 2004 is planning to use logistics firms as much as possible. Athens 2004 is currently considering three scenarios for the management of the Olympic Supply Center: one, choosing the firms that will offer the required storage areas and their management, including transportation to and from the Olympic venues; two, finding the storage areas and conceding part of them to the logistics firms to operate and three, conceding them in whole to the firms that will win the tender.
