lean safety
Lean Thinking has been associated in whole of business process, including development of products, manufacturing, purchasing, accounting, and various services.
Lean Safety focuses on culture, leaders, thought, methods of improvement and measures appropriate and necessary for deployment successful and lasting of any programme of prevention of risks or management system of occupational safety and health, by simple or complex to be, and without giving greater importance to productive sector.
However, it is manufacturing process where has had greater success thanks to pivotal role that have people at operational level.
“Safety is value-added, and hazards are waste“
You should consider ..Eight Wastes and their impact on safety hazards:
- Defects – Increased maintenance activities, hazardous material exposure, machine exposure
- Overproduction – Overexertion, extra handling, unnecessary machine interaction
- Waiting – Setups/Changeovers – hazardous energy exposure
- Not Using Employee Ideas – The company misses out on potential safety improvements
- Transportation – Extra handling, slip, trip and fall hazards, exposure to fork lift traffic
- Inventory – Falling loads, traffic congestion, trip hazards, extra handling
- Motion – Overexertion, poor ergonomic design
- Extra Processing – Unnecessary machine interaction
In a technique similar to the way that lean production managers now conduct “waste walks,” Lean Safety users expand the scope of these walks, having “eyes for hazards and waste,” and beginning to naturally identify opportunities for improvement in Lean and safety at the same time. This will lead to a culture in which the safety professional and the production manager are not adversaries, and where safety improvements come built in and are not just a regulatory measure or afterthought to your workplace layout.
In many plants, safety statistics are aggregated into facility-wide performance indicators. This practice homogenizes the data and does not provide the information needed to identify and address problems.This often leads to broad-stroke safety policies and delayed solutions to potential hazards.
Using the proven tool of Value Stream Mapping (VSM), Lean Safety help you get to the root of the activities from a process level, not just a plant level. So when improvement teams collect their initial data, they will compile statistics on each step of the process, highlighting the riskier areas of a production operation.
Each process will continue to be evaluated on production measures such as cycle time, work-in process inventory, and set-up time. In addition to these typical production measures, data will be gathered on measures of:
- Productivity Impacting Safety Wastes– Lost days, lost productivity
- Quality Impacting Safety Wastes – Total incidents
- Cost Impacting Safety Wastes – Direct costs paid, indirect cost impacts
This will bring into focus where the hazards lie within your plant and allow you and your managers to focus attention on improving the areas found to be of most concern.
Although worker safety is often considered to be first priority for some companies, on several occasions safety activity is driven by countries legislation instead of safety improvement initiative. In this sense, Lean Safety has a proactive approach and is not subject to countries legislation, providing a safe for the change of culture path, since it involves employees in an approach to build confidence. In short, is a facilitator for a change of culture.
• Focuses on strong connection between collaborative communication efforts and safety programs.
• Explains how a multi-functional team with a rotating leadership may be an effective structure on which we can build a safety program.
• Manages the measurement of the time employees spend on positive and proactive activities.
• Illustrates the integration of well known tools such as Kaizen Blitz, route processes, Benchmarking and root cause analysis.
But ..You will understand that this involves a cultural shift;
Therefore, as I mentioned earlier, results not be measured in six months, but probably in a couple of years, since it takes time for workers to understand and adapt to their new roles.
Warning: Not all companies are ready to fit this excellence model!
First of all the organizational structure of the company should look at.
If there is only a responsible for the training of persons who comply with rules, standards, procedures and instructions of safety, then you need to define how to involve a broader group of people in this leadership.
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Leaderships skills of Senior Manager are key to success and after a prudent time to deployment is highly likely that productivity indicators show an increase in their percentages and every day safety culture will be much better. It is also likely that the confidence of our team is getting stronger.
In other words, you will be creating a culture Lean.