Hapag-Lloyd and Maersk Line have agreed to cooperate in increasing the safety of Dangerous Goods. In a meeting which was held today in Hamburg Maersk Line showed their interest to implement the Hapag-Lloyd watchdog program into their business processes.
This watchdog together with the Hapag-Lloyd FIS (Freight Information System) is continuously examining cargo data to identify anything suspicious. It has a database of more than 6,000 keywords which is constantly being added to and refined. Dangerous goods that are declared imprecisely, incorrectly or not at all can potentially pose a major risk to crews, ships, the environment and other cargo on board.
Hapag-Lloyd has been developing the watchdog programme since 2011. With their many years of experience, Hapag-Lloyd’s dangerous goods and IT experts played a key role in creating effective search routines. The dangerous goods department was established almost 50 years ago and was the first in the shipping industry. Since then, Hapag-Lloyd’s internal specifications on dangerous goods have repeatedly formed the basis for statutory regulations and have thus become mandatory for the entire industry.
Last year, Hapag-Lloyd discovered 2,620 cases of incorrectly declared dangerous goods that were prevented from being shipped. Dangerous goods experts at Hapag-Lloyd investigated over 162,000 suspicious cases which were recorded using a newly developed watchdog software.