KiwiRail: driving behavioural change across container terminal operations
KiwiRail operates a network of container terminals where heavy machinery, container handling equipment and ground personnel work in close proximity. SonaSafe helped KiwiRail turn proximity events into visible, actionable data, supporting daily review, improved traffic management and long-term behavioural change.
The operating environment
KiwiRail is one of New Zealand’s largest transport and logistics providers, operating container terminal environments where heavy machinery and ground personnel need to work safely in close proximity. These environments involve container handling equipment, moving vehicles, changing workflows and high-consequence interaction risk.
The safety challenge
Despite strong safety protocols and training, KiwiRail continued to face risk from near misses and potential incidents. Operators of container handling equipment faced visibility constraints, while ground personnel needed to maintain safe distances from moving machinery. Once SonaSafe was installed, the data showed that safety breaches across the business were more common than expected, with some sites experiencing hundreds of breaches daily. This gave KiwiRail a clearer view of the risk patterns that needed attention.
The SonaSafe solution
SonaSafe provided real-time proximity alerts and incident dashboard reporting. The dashboard helped KiwiRail see on-ground behaviours, traffic flow pinch points and the difference between “work as imagined” and “work as done”. Using this information, KiwiRail worked with its teams to revise traffic management plans and improve the way exclusion zones were managed in daily operations.
Daily review and behaviour change
Any breach of an exclusion zone was immediately reported via radio. Management reviewed the previous day’s incidents at the start of each day, with most events categorised before the meeting. This helped leaders understand where breaches were occurring, why they were happening and what needed to change.
The impact was cultural as well as operational.Some shifts achieved zero alerts, and staff began celebrating when shifts ended without breaches.At a temporary site whereSonaSafewas not active, workers who were used toSonaSafe-enabled environments continued toobserveexclusion zones, showing that saferbehaviourshad started to carry beyond the technology itself.
The result
KiwiRail achieved strong long-term safety improvement across its terminal operations, including major reductions in near-miss incidents and exclusion-zone breaches. The partnership demonstrates how real-time alerts, dashboard reporting and behavioural insight can move safety management from reactive incident review to daily, data-led improvement.
“We established a temporary site without activating SonaSafe. Remarkably, the team – comprising staff previously accustomed to SonaSafe-enabled environments – continued to observe exclusion zones diligently. This experience underscores the enduring influence of SonaSafe on our workforce’s safety practices, highlighting that safety consciousness has become an ingrained aspect of our daily operations.”
Rob McMillan
Manager of Container Terminals for the North Island – KiwiRail
What this proves
The KiwiRail result shows how SonaSafe can support behaviour change in complex container terminal and mobile plant environments. The value is not only in the alert at the moment of risk. It is in the data that helps teams understand repeated behaviours, improve traffic management and strengthen safety culture over time.
