How Does Safety Contribute Toward World Class Manufacturing (WCM)?

In the journey to excellence in manufacturing, the role of safety cannot be overstated. Safety is not just a compliance requirement but a cornerstone in achieving World Class Manufacturing (WCM) standards.

World Class Manufacturing (WCM) is a management principle, a philosophy, a mantra that revolves around the following key concepts:

• Work towards becoming the best in terms of Quality, Cost and Delivery (QCD)
• Proactively eliminate waste
• Optimize production processes with a maniacal focus on Continuous Improvement (CI)
• Revisit processes to minimize defects and errors
• Make sure your people are engaged, involved and empowered to drive improvements and innovations
• Ensure manufacturing processes take into account health, well-being and safety of the people/workers and overall workplace

Among the many pillars that constitute WCM, the Safety or Security Pillar plays a crucial part. It emphasizes on a renewed mission to establishing a safe and healthy workplace, proactively preventing events, and achieving zero accidents and zero occupational diseases.

Such a workplace is believed to improve employee engagement and productivity, as it makes them feel cherished and encourages them to take ownership of their tasks. This helps with building the employer's brand reputation and lowers the production cost.

7-Steps to Achieving Zero Incidents

Achieving zero incidents is a journey of many steps. In the process, it helps:

• Improve process efficiency
• Increase employee skills and engagement
• Increase equipment performance and life

To achieve these goals, the organization must unite to own and implement safety management solutions for minimizing hazards and unsafe acts. The seven steps to achieve this are:

Step 1. Investigate Incidents: Determine the root causes of incidents. Near misses and observations must also be analyzed to understa  nd the final trigger for them to become incidents if they could have been prevented, and how to respond to such events in the future.

Step 2. Corrective and Preventive Action: Having identified the root cause, implement corrective action. Also, implement preventive measures to mitigate the future risk of such an event happening again.

Step 3. Assess and Mitigate Risks: Evaluate existing risk mitigation strategies based on the incident and near miss/observation data. Assess the potential of the risk becoming an event in the future, rank based on risk level, prioritize efforts and implement countermeasures. Providing focused training to inhibit unsafe behaviors must be part of the risk mitigation measures to minimize human error.

Step 4. Conduct Periodic Inspections: Inspections must be integral to safety management measures. Ensure that any findings of new risks and causes are made part of the inspection process and that the inspection team is trained to observe the risks and the effectiveness of the mitigative measures in countering the risks.

Step 5. Empower Employees: The worker on the shopfloor must also be trained to identify and report any potential safety risks. This will act as the first line of defense against potential failures and go a long way in ensuring continuous improvement in safety management.

Step 6. Continuous Improvement: The incident and near-miss data must be analyzed to improve the safety management system continuously. Once an improvement has been implemented, it must be monitored and tracked to ensure it has the desired effect. If not, course correction is essential.

Step 7. Management Review: Constant review of safety practices and their effectiveness by the management team is critical to communicate the organization's commitment to workplace safety. This will improve employee engagement and proactive management of safety incidents.

Appropriate metrics must also be put in place to measure the effectiveness of the safety management system.

The key lagging indicators include:

• No. of accidents and time away from work
• No. of accidents without time away from work
• Near misses
• Observations
• Unsafe behavior

The key leading indicators include:

• The no. of risks identified and eliminated
• Findings of safety management audit
• Training provided
• Employee engagement

5 Safety Best Practices

In WCM, safety is part of the 6S Framework, which includes Sort, Shine, Set-in-place, Standardize, Systemize, and Safety. To ensure workplace safety and achieve world-class manufacturing, implement the following best practices:

Best Practice #1: Create a Safety Team: A dedicated safety team provides the leadership and commitment needed to ensure workplace safety and employee engagement and facilitate cross-functional collaboration to share capabilities.

Best Practice # 2: Align Safety to Corporate Culture: Safety management can be effective only when the policies and procedures are aligned with the corporate culture and practices. Otherwise, there will be conflict, and it will lead to failure. Create the scope and procedures based on the nature of the company's industry, the individual company’s activities and policies, the opportunities and hazards, and regulations and standards governing the industry—factor in the geography where the company has operations.

Best Practice #3: Create a Safety Policy and Framework: Policies and guidelines state the company’s commitment to safety and compliance by enunciating the safety mission, vision, strategy, and objectives. These must be reviewed periodically and updated based on changes in regulations, operations, and market conditions.

Best Practice #4: Implementation of a Safety Management Systems: The policies are translated into action through clearly defined SOPs, employee training, implementation of 6S, and periodic inspections and audits.

Best Practice #5: Proactive Safety Management: Continuous improvement, culture of safety, risk assessment and mitigation, predictive maintenance, and reviews and monitoring enable proactive safety management. This leads to improvements in operations and excellence in manufacturing.

Safety Management and World-Class Manufacturing with ComplianceQuest

ComplianceQuest Safety Management Solution is cloud-based and built on Salesforce. It enables proactive safety management by:

• Providing organizations with safety-related data to track leading and lagging indicators and make strategic decisions
• Enabling predictive maintenance, training, and centralized access to documents to ensure the facilities are running in top-class condition by skilled operators in alignment with safety policies
• Identifying and mitigating risks based on ranking for addressing critical hazards first and optimizing resource utilization
• Improving compliance by aligning processes with regulatory requirements and standards, both internal and external
• Empowering workers with tools to identify and report unsafe conditions and behavior proactively
• Performing root cause analysis and trigger CAPA where needed to minimize future recurrence of incidents

To know more, visit: https://www.compliancequest.com/health-and-safety-incident-management-software/