Six sigma approach in safety performance at transport logistics industry

Abstract

This Company is one of the largest multipurpose port in Malaysia which provides facilities and services to handle variety of cargoes ranging from containers, cars, break bulk cargoes, dry bulk cargoes and liquid bulk cargoes. The company divided into three main core business divisions which are Container Division, Conventional and Logistics Services and Marine Divisions. Based on Pareto analysis, Conventional & Logistics Services has the highest number of accidents with 75% of total number of accidents in year 2014. In this company, the trend analysis of accident keep increasing month by month. In this study using DMAIC approach, the objectives of this study is to improve safety performance by decreasing the number of accident focused on Conventional & Logistics Division by using six sigma approach. Six sigma is a quality tools for process improvement. It involved five phases which using many quality tools to identify problem and improves the process. The data being analysed by using statistical method and graph. As conclusion, the average number of accident decrease from 7.33 to 7.25 and the trend analysis shows decline graph compared to before. Based on the hypothesis testing, using the p-value, it was found the shift pattern, safety culture (unsafe act unsafe condition report submission), accidents location, type of activity and contractors have significance impact to number of accident. Meanwhile, number of tonnage handled (productivity) and number of man-hour does not have significance impact to the number of accident. It was also found that there is no significance between numbers of accident happen at night shift, morning shift or afternoon shift. It can be concluded that, the six sigma approach are suitable method to analyse accident and can be a significance approach in determining the root cause of accident in the company.