| clocks for websites |
Article
Help Maintenance Establish a Culture of Safety
November 1, 2005 By: Tom Andel Paperboard PackagingMaking safety and maintenance top priorities will bring paybacks to the bottom line.
Safety and maintenance are both bottom line issues, but rarely do managers discuss them in the same context. Many managers of converting operations say their worst problems are associated with quality and productivity. Those problems come about because of poor management decisions related to machine maintenance and employee training.
 The roundtable participants clockwise from left: Dirk Pastoor, David Levy, Josh Powers, Lee Shillito, Michael Day, and Jim Walton. |
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recently reported the top 11 citations issued to companies in the corrugated and solid fiber industry for the 12-month period ending in September. Topping the list were two infractions directly linked to maintenance procedures. Number one is lockout/tagout, accounting for 15 citations and a total of $14,900 in penalties. Coming in second is powered industrial trucks, with 11 citations amounting to $7,625 in penalties. There were 89 citations in all, amounting to $58,368.
When poor maintenance procedures result in an unsafe environment, whether related to improper lockout/tagout, or even nitty-gritty issues like excess noise or dirty work areas, lost work days further erode the bottom line, as do costs related to overtime, temporary replacements and worker's comp.
 |
Without the proper maintenance procedures, safety can't exist. In fact the two must co-exist if managers are to improve quality and productivity. With that proposition in mind, Paperboard Packaging co-sponsored a web conference with Kiwiplan Inc. to discuss the topic further with industry practitioners.
The panel members were:
- 1. Henry Swenor, Packaging Division maintenance and reliability manager, Georgia-Pacific Corp.;
- 2. Michael Day, manufacturing manager, Lewisburg Container Corp.;
- 3. Dave Levy, consultant, Psquared;
- 4. Lee Shillito, president and ceo, and Josh Powers,production manager, Triad Packaging Inc.; and
- 5. Jim Walton, president, and Dirk Pastoor, marketing manager, Kiwiplan Inc.
The discussion started with the blocking and tackling of any safety program.
Lockout/Tagout
"We train all our new employees on lockout/tagout, and validate annually," Swenor says. "Any time we upgrade equipment we monitor our lockout/tagout as part of the commissioning process, making sure it's correct. Our procedures are documented and posted so machine operators and maintenance mechanics can lock out their machines per procedure. Everything is documented with pictures and placards; it's basically a step-by-step process meeting all the OSHA requirements."
 |
Day agrees about lockout/tagout's strategic importance, however he thinks OSHA's guidelines are a little vague.
"There are times with setup and maintenance where I think there are some gray areas," he says. "But the most common mistake surrounding lockout/tagout is not doing it. It's a daily battle to get it done. Any time you don't focus on it, somebody will take advantage and not lock the machine out. It's a struggle."
Day says the best way to make sure lockout/tagout is done right is to give supervisors and fellow employees a stake in its proper execution. But converters must also include other aspects of equipment safety, especially if you r equipment is a mix of old and new.
 |
"You have to compare your older equipment against equipment produced today, including its guarding," Day continues. "Some equipment isn't produced any more, so you have to use your best judgment on how to get it guarded. You also have equipment from different countries, and that poses safety issues depending on their safety requirements."
Keeping Tabs
Shillito stresses the importance of regular procedural audits to keep staff members honest.
"It's easy to have the procedures in place, but if you're not auditing, you will find that you're not following your own procedures," he maintains. "That will lead to some serious accidents. I've seen that happen because we weren't following our own procedures."
Indeed, poor decision making was selected as the cause of most workplace injuries, according to a poll of webcast attendees. That finding supports the value of a practice Swenor swears by.
 Safety and Maintenance Webcast Poll Results |
"Within Georgia-Pacific, our job observation program is designed to address poor decision making and unsafe behavior," he says. "It's a peer-to-peer review of job performance. I go out and observe my peers on the job to find out whether or not anybody is making unsafe decisions, and I help correct that on a peer-to-peer level.
"Based on an investigation of our history, bad decision making is one of our leading causes of incidents. It's not equipment or processes, it's people making bad decisions, and not necessarily for bad reasons. They're trying to do the right thing. Equipment might be down, and they're in a hurry to get it back up, and they just aren't thinking the process through completely, and they're taking a risk they shouldn't."
Keep It Going
Once those problems are addressed by a training program, the challenge becomes sustainability.
"Over the last 15 years I can't tell you how many times that's been the root cause of the failure of any training program, whether it's safety or the implementation of lean manufacturing or sales training," Levy says. "If the president, ceo or general manager of a facility is serious about safety, everybody in that plant notices. It's in their body language when the brass is conducting a plant tour for a top customer. If you're walking in an area that requires hearing protection, and you don't make the customer wear hearing protection and you don't wear hearing protection, what have you just told the average employee on the floor?"
Levy suggests that a good way to reinforce training is with "shift tailgate meetings."
 |
"It doesn't have to be an hour a week, or five hours a month," he explains. "Fifteen minutes a week or 30 minutes every other week spent on shift or tailgate meetings can improve the operation of a particular machine center. In addition to safety, you can also cover three or four other topics like quality. But you do it at the same time, and it's scheduled, just like preventive maintenance is scheduled."
Walton suggests testing employees periodically to see if training has transferred from the academic to the practical.
"I've seen plant managers purposely do something unsafe, drop something, litter, do something small, just to see if people were watching or attempted to remedy the situation," he says.
 |
Shillito agrees that housekeeping is an important part of safety."We tie housekeeping and safety together," he says. "We offer monthly incentives for housekeeping, and quarterly and annually for no lost time incidents. We've had dramatic positive results. In fact, for the average plant, a housekeeping program is the way to get started with safety."
Online Training
There are a variety of media available to supplement a training program, but nothing should replace in-person contact, according to several panel members.
"I think there's room for both live and online training," Walton says. "Web-based training allows you to hit a wide audience. And you can have interactive testing so if you get a question right you know right away, and if you get it wrong you can find out why it was wrong and dig deeper into that. You can produce something very quickly, get it out specifically for an initiative or something and then go on with other things."
Day agrees. "It's great for lockout/tagout and for hazard identification," he says. "It's amazing the things you can do — just pull a couple people out of your operation without shutting the whole plant down."
Swenor explains how he combined live and web-based training: "We've done some web-based polling to find out where our weaknesses are and then once we've taken those polls and identified what our needs are for safety training, we've created some live training that addresses those specific areas," he says. "It's not really web-based training, but more like web-based polling and assessing — to understand what our needs are. We've done that for lockout/tagout issues, too."
Outside-Industry Ideas
The panelists agree it's important to look outside one's own industry to find good training programs to model.
"There are a lot of companies, neighbors of yours, small plants, larger plants, and they're all willing to share safety information," Levy says. "In our industry, benchmarking a competitor isn't always easy, but in your community, benchmarking safety through safety managers or human resources departments will help produce new ideas and best practices."
Swenor adds: "We actually invited one of the local fire companies to come in and inspect a plant, and that was a pretty successful program and helped build some community relations."
Practically speaking, it also means higher profits.
"A lot of money can be driven to the bottom line with a good safety record," Shillito says. "In our case, probably in the thousands of dollars, when you consider workman's comp costs. It doesn't happen overnight, but you start seeing it really add up over the years. That's the reason the integrated guys do such a great job. Safety means millions of dollars to them."
"The worker's comp costs at a single integrated box plant I know of were as much as $250,000 a year," Levy adds. "They were having a lot of accidents, some serious. It took about two years, but they got that cost down to $30,000 or $40,000."
Walton realizes the strategic importance of safety and maintenance: "Plants are in a race," he says. "By and large the machinery is identical throughout the industry, the quality of paper is good and the technology is the same. So what allows you to win the race, what allows you to add more money to the bottom line, to stay in business and not only that, but to grow the business, is managing your downtime. Those people who use anything and everything they can get their hands on to improve their maintenance and safety records will add to their bottom line and differentiate themselves from the competition."
