Who is Port Taranaki?
Recognised for its outstanding maritime safety and environmental standards, Port Taranaki is the only deep-water seaport on New Zealand’s western seaboard.
Established in 1875, the port now has nine fully serviced berths, special expertise in ‘heavy lift’ operations and can handle a diverse range of cargoes including those of the farming, engineering and petrochemical industries.
Port Taranaki works hard every day to provide world-class logistics to its customers while operating as a responsible corporate citizen for the benefit of all its stakeholders.
Facing a Challenge
Without a full-time lawyer on staff, Port Taranaki was facing a challenge in keeping its legal compliance obligations current across its diverse operations.
Carlie Cossill, Port Taranaki’s Risk & Business Improvement Manager, explains the three main challenges they were facing keeping on top of their legal compliance obligations:
“We are a small organisation with limited resources, large volume of obligations due to the diversity of our business, [and] an expectation from the Board to be legislatively compliant.”
Finding a Solution
Port Taranaki had heard good things about ComplyWith from other organisations. Carlie explains more:
“Once we started working with the ComplyWith team we realised what great value for money the system was …. We are really keen on investing in IT systems that help to streamline our processes and ComplyWith really fit the bill.”
Thanks to the smooth implementation process, which was in Carlie’s words, “simple and well supported”, Port Taranaki is now aware of and assessing themselves against 72 pieces of legislation, 50 more than before.
“We have also devolved responsibility for signing off on legal compliance from 6 people to 26 people. This means that the people with responsibilities are the ones answering the review questions every six months and this has helped educate staff on their legal obligations.
We have done two surveys now and we get more clarity with each survey.”
Seeing Results
“ComplyWith has provided an easily accessible legal platform for us to assess ourselves against,” says Carlie. “We don’t need to continuously seek legal advice about our obligations as the ComplyWith team keep the system up to date for us.”
“The Board now have better visibility of where we are non-compliant or partially compliant with particular items of legislation. We are assessing a much wider range of legislation and there are more people involved in the assessment. The IT platform also allows for excellent reporting and visibility of the results in real-time.”
ComplyWith is proud to be working with Port Taranaki and helping it to maintain high standards. This, in turn, helps the Port deliver on its vision of providing world-class logistics to all its customers.
