Medicina Ocupacional y Asuntos de Salud

Abstracto

Competitive Advantages of Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems for Ports

Mohammad Ali Hassanzadeh

Globalization put ports in a dominant position in intercontinental trade and transport that resulted to handling more than 8.7 billion tons of diverse cargoes in 2011. In fierce business environment, being port of call for shipping lines and distribution center for cargo owners, require ports to be as competitive and efficient as possible. Less efficient ports with higher service costs lose their market shares and customers to their competitors and will fade out from business accordingly. Port authorities do their best to cut costs and rise availability, flexibility and marketability of port services for their customers consequently. Such objectives accomplished through optimizing operational performance indicators in ports such as increasing equipment utilization factors and decreasing waiting time, idle time and service time. But the main question is how to improve such indicators to control and even reduce the service costs? Applying know how import management and operation, using modern equipment, increasing public private partnership and last but not least, creating port community systems integrated with information technologies are the most widely used strategies to create service competitiveness. Are such practices the ultimate critical success factors to be used by port authorities in the business environment? International Labor Organization has tried to prevent and reduce accidents and ill health in ports since the 1920s, when the first Convention on accident prevention in ports was adopted. Hopefully in recent decades attention toward individuals who work in ports has changed from simple dock workers to human capitals. Subsequently variety of occupational health and safety management systems (OHSMS) are nowadays in place. But these systems generally focused on protection of people, properties and environment while this research tries to elaborate advantages of OHSMS on optimizing ports’ operational performance indicators and explain their final impacts on creating competitive advantages that should be met by world class ports.