Ocean Transport—Safety Initiatives for Vessel Operations
Aware that ensuring the safety of vessel operations underpins its business activities, the NYK Group has established the Safety and Environmental Management Committee chaired by the president. Under this committee’s guidance, personnel offshore and onshore make a concerted effort to maintain and improve a range of safety initiatives. The main focus of such efforts is vessels, which often operate in remote locations.
To keep safety efforts consistent despite this remoteness, we believe that ensuring everyone involved shares goals rigorously and sustains efforts day in and day out through PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) cycles is paramount. Because this process calls for systemisation, we input information on accidents and problems into a database. We then decide strategies and countermeasures for improvement activities by using vessels’ downtime as a measurement of the degree to which we have achieved safe vessel operations and by analysing the risks latent in problems that have arisen. We communicate these strategies and countermeasures to all operating vessels’ seafarers through a monthly magazine, Calm Sea, which provides safety information. Further, our unique NAV9000 audits check that frontline operations are advancing safety activities steadily.