Ng Peng Choo is Head of Engineering for Saudi Global Ports, PSA’s terminal in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. Peng Choo has been expertly resolving mechanical and electrical maintenance issues throughout his 27-year tenure with PSA.

As long as you have the proper motivation, it’s easy to be innovative! Peng Choo relates with humour that he had observed his young son creatively using materials such as tooth picks and glue to fix the hinge of a folding writing table, motivated by the strong desire to avoid punishment for damaging the table in the first place.

With the right opportunity, support and the grit to keep trying without giving up, Peng Choo believes that everyone can succeed in finding a solution to a problem. Innovation is about possessing a passion to improve on the existing, overcoming its current limitations, and digging deep to have the courage to accept failure in order to try again.

Reflecting back on some of the projects he has been involved in over the years, Peng Choo cites the development of the Articulated Parallel Spreader (APS) for Dammam to be the biggest challenge of his career thus far. The goal was to build a spreader that could safely handle containers for the 23rd and last row of a mega vessel, without the need to expensively modify the boom length of our quay cranes. Peng Choo describes gathering a team to canvass the ground for opinions, and also the difficulty of sourcing for a company to partner up with to develop the APS system. No company wanted to do it except one! With his team’s persistence, the APS is finally about to be put into operation at Dammam after commissioning works in August 2019.

In an effort to understand the quirky nature of the mind of an innovator, we asked Peng Choo: “If you could have one superpower, which would you choose?” Clearly, work is his passion as he wished to be able to link up to any electrical system and immediately understand what its circuit problems were!