The annual Manufacturing Safety Excellence Awards provide much-deserved recognition of some of our industry’s best safety performers. These are organizations that think beyond the minimal requirements for safety compliance and instead choose to make safety a core business value in their day-to-day operations.
How do they do this? By focusing on the three pillars – or the “three Cs” – of a comprehensive safety program, which include:
- Creating a strong safety culture
- Developing a formal compliance strategy
- Making capital investments that address both safety and productivity
To get a sense of what this holistic approach to safety involves, you need only take a look at the three winners of this year’s Manufacturing Safety Excellence Awards.
Dana Incorporated: plant-level award
The Dana Incorporated plant in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which produces automotive gearing and axle components, was recognized for a safety program that places worker safety above all other plant functions.
The plant commits significant resources to improving safety processes and makes safety consciousness a core attribute within the employee culture. This has positively benefitted safety in the plant in multiple ways. For example, safety managers describe how employees feel empowered to identify and report potential hazards. Employees also share safety ideas because they know management will review their suggestions.
Beyond safety, employee suggestions have served to help improve productivity, quality and efficiency in the plant.
The plant also uses a stringent “Design in Safety” risk-assessment process to help achieve compliance with relevant safety requirements. The process requires equipment suppliers to validate that machine-safety systems will function as designed before they are installed in the plant. When new machinery arrives at the plant, engineering and safety groups collaborate to help meet all requirements.
OCME: enterprise-level award
Safety is a companywide focus and key differentiator for OCME, a global supplier of packaging, filling and handling solutions, and complete production lines. The company, headquartered in Italy, follows safety standards when designing its machinery, but also goes beyond compliance to help customers improve both safety and productivity.
OCME makes a point to work with its customers’ engineering and EHS teams to help make sure machinery meets both of their goals. The company says this approach can be particularly useful for large multinational organizations, which must meet compliance across multiple plants.
Ultimately, the machinery OCME delivers to customers include advanced safety features and documented risk assessments, which benefit both the engineering and EHS teams.
MESNAC: enterprise-level award
MESNAC, which supplies rubber and tire machinery, has a companywide focus on safety that has helped the company expand into new markets around the world. The Chinese company’s safety focus includes continuously improving the company’s internal safety culture while also building machinery for customers using the most stringent global safety standards.
The MESNAC EHS team closely works with site management and company leadership to carry out the safety program. Additionally, all MESNAC employees are held accountable for safety, and the subject is the first covered in daily operations meetings.
The company also incorporates productivity-enhancing safety features into its machinery designs. It uses zone control, for example, which allows customers to service one zone in a production line while the rest of the line continues to run as normal.
As MESNAC Vice President Mingjin Yu put it: “We help our customers realize that safety doesn’t have to come at the expense of productivity.”
This article was originally published on ControlGlobal.com.
