Lifting the Standard of Efficiency

Our Lean Academy develops and upskills our people to be the best versions of themselves every day. We trust our employees are the experts on the jobs and empower them to look out for improvement opportunities to make their jobs safer and better. We create an engaging workplace that builds on the creativity, passion and problem-solving capabilities of our people. 

The result is that EVERYONE across our organisation is continually looking for areas of 'waste'. Being skilled in identifying waste is becoming increasingly important on our journey to be the World´s Best Terminal Company.

Jidoka is how we optimize quality. Through autonomation and human touch we ensure that our products and services are free of defects.

Not to be confused with automation, autonomation is a self-reliant work system that is designed to prevent the user/system from making errors, detecting abnormalities/errors and raising an alarm, or on detecting abnormality triggering a rectification mechanism to correct the error/variation.

We have formalised how we continuously improve to create more value for our customers and improve our Way of Working itself. We do this through a Kaizen Ecosystem.

This involves a combination of Kaizen Events. These involve everyone, from managers to floor staff, every day and every location to continuously review and improve processes. For more clearly defined issues that require a more radical step change an event may involve a group of employees intensively for a number of days.

The outcomes provide value to everyone in the organization and to our customers. Kaizen Events are directly linked to our company strategy and as such, a critical enabler to success.

Every colleague is encouraged to always be thinking of new ways to improve their performance. Then, this loop repeats, further refining what we do and how we do it. The elements and methods that comprise Way of Working are used across terminals globally, creating a common language and one way of working.

Without standards in place, performance levels can vary and customer's aren't guaranteed a consistent high level of service. Our Way of Working sharpens our customer focus, enabling an ever-high level of performance for our customers worldwide.

Standard Work
We use a process called Standard Work to establish, communicate, maintain, and improve uniform standards across our organisation. These standards as a starting point for future improvement at any one of our terminals around the world. 

Training Within Industry
To ensure that all our people follow processes consistently, we are standardizing how they do their jobs and ensuring that they faithfully adhere to these standards. We accelerate standardization through a hands-on training program called Training Within Industry (TWI).

Standards are core to APM Terminal´s Safer, Better, Bigger Strategy. With the standardization program we deliver what we promise - a stable and predictable service to our customers, contributing to a safe and efficient execution of the work by increasing the competency of our job experts.

Every day across our terminals, performance is assessed by a group of employees, using visualisations of four customer-facing priorities: Safety, Quality, Delivery and Cost (SQDC). In some instances we track progress multiple times per day.

These are assessed this exact sequence to ensure we prioritise correctly. Imagine, if we delivered the wrong container (Quality) on time (Delivery), you, the customer wouldn't be happy, even if it was Cost effective. SQDC helps us to be more customer centric by addressing smaller problems before they get bigger, enabling escalation early on and removing obstacles.

Without standards in place, performance levels can vary. Way of Working sharpens our customer focus, enabling an ever-high level of performance for our customers worldwide.