Northport, a member of MMC Group, recently became the first Malaysian port to be awarded the ISO 45001:2018 standard.
Northport’s CEO, Dato’ Azman Shah Mohd Yusof, said: “As one of Malaysia’s busiest ports, we saw the need for our workplace to be certified with ISO 45001 to proactively improve our occupational health and safety performance in preventing injury and ill-health at the workplace.
“The efforts toward the certification is also a testament of Northport’s commitment to protect our employees, customers, contractors, service providers and port users from work-related accidents.”
ISO 45001 is an ISO standard for management systems of OSH that helps organisations to improve employee safety, reduce workplace risks and create better, safer working conditions.
According to Dato’ Azman, Northport’s journey towards ISO 45001:2018 certification began in 2012 when its Health, Safety & Environment (HSE) performance was showing a very alarming deteriorating trend.
The journey towards HSE Excellence was meticulously crafted and was divided into three phases within a period of nine years with the focus to improve HSE culture and eventually to be recognised locally and internationally.
The effort was further intensified after MMC Group took over the ownership Northport in early 2016.
New safety initiatives
Under the new leadership, the initiatives in getting the certification were strengthened and immediate returns from the efforts was enjoyed with the improvement of more than 20% on Lost Time Injury (LTI) performance.
Among the HSE initiatives undertaken by the port is the Health, Safety and Environment Omission Notification (HON).
HON is a mechanism designed to enforce safety compliance on the port users, contractors and employees within the port premises.
According to Dato’ Azman, prior to HON, the port had a Non-Conformity Report (NCR) as an enforcement tool which was not as effective.
When they launched HON in February 2017, Northport saw an immediate drop in the number of incidents and accidents.
UCUX or ‘You See You Act’ is another initiative introduced by the Company to promote and enhance incident reporting.
UCUX is a programme in which incident alerts can be immediately done through the use of mobile phone via calls or text messages and action will be taken immediately.
To further enhance its safety measures, Northport has imposed the usage of vehicle stickers on all vehicles entering the port premises to ensure that only authorised vehicles are allowed to enter the port area.
Northport has also introduced a shuttle service arrangement for the crew of vessels intending to exit or enter the port area.
A speed limit of 35 km per hour was also imposed on all motorised vehicles in the port area.
Enforcement officers equipped with speed gun devices are placed at accident-prone areas as part of its strict implementation of the regulation to curtail the risk of traffic incidences within the port footprint.
Enhanced security measures
Drug and substance abuse are also taken seriously by Northport.
The Company has established a policy with regards to drugs, alcohol and illegal substance to preserve the health, safety and welfare of its employees and other port users.
To ensure thorough monitoring and to strengthen the security of the port area, Northport has enhanced its terminal surveillance with the use of a drone and closed-circuit surveillance system.
The new system utilises the latest in video surveillance technology, including facial recognition, license plate character identification, intrusion detection and night viewing.
The monitoring and controlling of the system are centralised at Northport’s new Surveillance Centre.
It houses high resolution intelligent large screen panels with a customisable configuration that receives its feed from 158 cameras from various locations around Northport.
This fully integrated closed-circuit surveillance system is built on smart software that is scalable and upgradeable with features to fulfil the growing and evolving security challenges of the future.
“With its full implementation effective 1 May 2019, Northport is the first Malaysian port to use the integrated drone-closed circuit surveillance system round-the-clock to fulfil various port security needs including general surveillance, parameter monitoring and detection of suspicious activity,” said Dato’ Azman.
