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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Ben Hershey, President & Coach 4Ward Consulting Group, LLC
Adverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
August 2018 #10229 Page #24
The Relationship Between Lean and Safety
n my experience and with the work I do with hundreds of component manufacturers, I find that many companies will tell me Safety is important, but, in practice, safety is treated as a burden on the company. Good managers will always have an attitude that they want all of their employees to be safe and to end the shift in the same physical condition they started in. But sadly and quite often, the cost of safety (e.g., additional time and capital spent for material and equipment) gets in the way of making good decisions. When the cost of safety becomes a burden to the organization, the safety approach begins to suffer.
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You are probably saying to yourself—there is no way this is really the attitude of my team—but, as the owners of LBMs and component and millwork operations, we need to make sure. If safety is a burden to our supervision teams and associates, then we need to turn that around and find ways to add value and achieve the level of safety required. The way to accomplish that is by making your safety approach more efficient. How much time is your supervision team spending on safety? Do they talk about safety during the shift huddle? Are they committed to achieving results in safety committee meetings and so they complete a Job Safety Analysis form that is reviewed with the ownership/ management team? As an industry, we have several areas in our operation that can be considered risk concerns and, like other industries, we have had accidents with unfortunate and deadly results. But also as an industry, we have tools that operations can use to improve safety and provide levels of excellence.
Here are some Next Practices to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your safety approach: Integrate Safety into Operational and Support Processes Safety should be a part of everything we do, when we review lean processes in the plants or yard, to how we conduct business in the office. To foster integration, operational leaders may need to help their safety professionals become more operationally savvy. A specific example of safety integration is including the hazardous energy control (lockout/tagout) process in the work order and/or work instruction. This creates a more efficient and integrated work process where maintenance staff are less likely to forget the requisite safety measures. Therefore, doing the job well means doing the job safely. How many of your folks hate to conduct an accident review or fill out the related Job Safety/Hazard Analysis form? Part of the reason is that it’s perceived as “extra.” Perceptions of extra work, time, paperwork, etc., contribute to poor decision-making. Integrating the safety form expectations into operational standard work will make safety and the work process more effective and efficient.
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