Albert Praditya moved to Singapore from Indonesia to study engineering and upon graduation in 2020, he joined TotalEnergies. Now, as Lubmarine’s Transport Safety Manager in Singapore, he is responsible for rolling out the Company’s flagship road transport safety program across the Lubmarine global network, a task he says is both interesting and rewarding.
How did you come to join Lubmarine?
I studied engineering and when I graduated, I joined TotalEnergies in the maintenance department of Singapore Lubricants Blending Plant. After that I quickly moved to the HSE department of the Plant and began working on energy management systems and sustainability projects. That was until January of this year when I joined Lubmarine to roll out this safety program.
My task is to implement a safety management system specifically for road transport – so this means trucks that deliver our products from warehouses or blenders to ports or from ports when importing goods from different countries.
Can you tell me more about the safety management system?
We have a dedicated program that sets out our corporate standards for road transport safety. Its objective is simple but vital: to reduce accidents and ensure that every journey made by our trucks is carried out under the highest safety conditions. The program provides a common framework across our operations worldwide, helping us align expectations with transporters, strengthen driver training, and promote continuous improvement in vehicle and operational safety.
Ultimately, it’s about building a shared culture where safety is always the priority, no matter the country or the circumstances. For me, the most important part is making sure everyone — from drivers to transporters — knows that safety comes first in everything we do.
What are the challenges of applying the same safety standards the world over?
Each country has different national standards – in the U.S. and Europe the regulations are more stringent than the other parts of the world. Typically, in countries with less stringent regulations, the gap with our requirement is larger. So, we need to figure out how to deal with that, as it tends to make the situation more complex.
But more often we can apply the same standards but with different solutions. For example, in Europe, it is the local requirement for all the trucks to be installed with a digital tachograph. They measure how long the truck has been running, how long the drivers have driven and the breaks they have taken. It also tracks any speeding events. Interesting fact – in Europe, the police do not even have to stop a speeding truck – they just need to drive alongside the truck to read the tachograph from the inside of their car.
In any case, in terms of devices, the tachograph is standardised and ubiquitous. But in Asia, only a few countries we operate in have requirements of having a tachograph. So, we need to monitor our drivers’ working and resting hours in a different way, some transporters installed a different kind of monitoring system, while some has to manually record the start and end time of the trips. So, here is an example of where the implementation will be very different.
This sounds like a job that has many moving parts!
What’s interesting is when you are setting up something new, like a new safety process, and it involves a lot of coordination, between me, Customer & Operations Support, the HSE department and transporters. It is very dynamic because there are different circumstances – you get everything from big companies that have all the resources in the world to small family businesses with limited resources. Despite that, we prioritise safety and apply standardized safety procedures for everyone. It is highly dynamic and there are a lot of challenges and what I find interesting is that the job is not monotonous at all!
So, what are the rewards of your job?
The reward is … When I face a unique challenge but eventually, I manage to guide a team or implement something to solve the problem and do it in a way that’s sustainable – meaning the team can do it without my input anymore – that gives me the satisfaction that I’ve managed to solve a problem and make someone’s life easier, not to mention safer!
After a hard day’s work, what do you do to relax?
After a hard day’s work, I like to relax by playing video games with friends — recently I’ve been enjoying Silksong, a long‑awaited release we were all excited about.
