NYK has been recognized with the 2019 Seafarers Safety Initiative Grand Prize awarded by Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) for the company’s seafarer safety activities. The award recognizes NYK’s initiatives to prevent human accidents and utilize engine data. A ceremony was held on September 4 at the ministry’s office in Tokyo and attended by NYK managing corporate officer Tomoyuki Koyama.

NYK Group and Daitron Co., Ltd. jointly developed Kirari NINJA, which enables users to realize the precise condition of the combustion chamber interior and thus eliminate the need for the crew to partake of the long, hard process to examine the interior condition at high temperatures. The development also helps to reduce human accidents because there is no need to insert a hand to photograph the interior by using a conventional digital camera, thus preventing serious accidents.

Moreover, NYK has combined this photo data with operational data collected by the ship information management system (SIMS) and engine data collected by an electronic checklist to developed software that can diagnose internal chamber conditions at a high level, thereby determining the causes of failures at an early stage and maintaining safe operations.

With this commendation as an incentive, NYK will continue to position navigational safety as the most important task and advance digitalization to create new value based on the group’s medium-term management plan “Staying Ahead 2022 with Digitalization and Green.”