Project Description

Palestinian Shippers’ Council (PSC), PalTrade and PFI are partnering to implement the project titled “Creating a Competitive Edge of the Palestinian MSMEs in the Local and Potential Export Markets” in West Bank and Gaza.

The Project aims to increase the capacity of MSMEs by targeting selected priority sectors/products to increase their market share locally and internationally. A key factor hindering export competitiveness has been the high transaction cost involved in exports. Transaction cost related to trade involves a host of regulatory requirements, procedures and compliance measures; besides infrastructure-related cost- including transport cost to bring product to the border, time and money spent in ports on border procedures, international transportation costs and communication costs. Along with this, documentation has become an additional burden. The Design of the project focuses mainly on improving the competitiveness of the selected companies on a firm/industry level, where the project implementing partners will employ their resources in favor of the project’s objective to help the targeted companies meet markets’ needs.

Title Assignment:

Export Supply Chain Reporting

Objective of the Assignment:

The objective of the assignment is to identify all Export Supply Chain that Palestinian Shippers are benefiting from, in addition to all costs of transport, storage, transshipment, time, etc., for various routes to and from Palestine.

Tasks:

The consultant is required to fulfil the following tasks:

1.            Meet with a selected number of importers and exporters in Palestine to develop costs and time required to move cargo including conducting analysis current Freight Forwarding system per enrolled company in the project and provide us with solution of how to reduce the transaction cost over the following routes:

• • Through Haifa port
  • Through Ashdod port
  • Through King Hussein Bridge to Jordan
  • Through King Hussein Bridge to GCC countries
  • Any other route used (i.e., Aqaba, Eilat, etc.)

2.            Identify separately items such as transport costs, storage, loading/unloading, and documentation and information flow in particular access to export logistics information costs.

3.            For those goods shipped through King Hussein Bridge, identify separately the costs of back-to-back transshipment of cargo, including direct costs of this handling, cost of waiting time for the vehicle being off loaded as well as waiting time for the vehicle to be loaded.

4.            For each route, specify which elements are being shipped: inputs to the production process or outputs.

Qualifications:

This assignment is defined to be for individual consultants, and the consultant should have:

• Proven experience in conducting similar assignment

• Proven experience to comprehensive business diagnostics studies in the areas of production, management, marketing, finance, export transactions, and the designing of business strategies and plans.

• Excellent skills in writing reports
• Proven record in his/her knowledge in conducting development reports
• A minimum of Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Economics, Industrial engineering or any other related or equivalent fields
• Proven experience of at least 5 years in private sector/SME donor development projects.

Skills in the following domains are of a particular interest:

• Export Supply Chain knowledge and experience
• Qualitative and Quantitative research skills.
• Good communication skills in English and Arabic both orally and in writing.
• Good interpersonal and team working skills.
• Good handling of work tasks in demanding conditions.

Duration, Timeline and Reporting

The level of effort for this assignment shall not exceed 32 calendar days over two months period. The commencement date of this assignment is expected to be June 10^th, 2018. The final report should be submitted at the end of the consultancy; and should summarizes the above information. The report should not exceed 20 pages.

All deliverables should be submitted to the project manager Ihab Barghothi at ibarghothi@psc.ps.

This call for consultants is open until June 6^rd 2018. Qualified professional consultants are invited to submit their CVs and Reference letters to the following email address: info@psc.ps

Please include “Export Supply Chain - call for consultants” in the subject line of your email.