Standardization: Challenges and Opportunities

There are many challenges companies are facing today. From unexpected events to economic pressure to the job market—it has become difficult for companies to keep their Lean approach to safety management. Waiting times are increasing, quality is decreasing, and companies are overburdened.

Why is this happening? And is there a way to resolve it?

Over the last couple of years, companies have faced a few significant challenges that make operations suffer. Waiting times for permits and other operational necessities have increased and, because of this, the quality of them is often poor. This all applies pressure to the workforce, and employees are overburdened.

Compounding this problem are two factors:

• Job market: It is challenging to retain staff when they have an abundance of job opportunities available to them. High turnover results in lost knowledge and experience and lost time with training and onboarding.
• Supplier availability: Suppliers are also overworked and have an abundance of jobs available to them—they can pick and choose what they want. Companies, then, must work with whoever is available, which means a lot of time is spent getting the contractor up to speed on the company’s operations and goals.

This situation has created an overburdened workforce in the safety management industry. Companies that are trying to operate on Lean principles cannot deal with these disruptive events and challenges. Companies need a new solution to resolve this issue—standardization.

Two approaches to Safety Management

The old way to approach safety management projects, tasks, or jobs was by asking: what are we going to do?

A company will look at what needs to be done and pull together contracts, permits, and tasks and responsibilities. They might draw on past experiences or ideas but are creating something new each time. This approach focuses on creation and idea generation—always starting at square one and trying to decide how to move forward.

In contrast, the new safety management solution is to work with standardized templates that go beyond generic instruction for several types of activities and hazards, like a corporate standard on how to handle hot work, line break, etc. This is about setting up very detailed standards for the many jobs that are carried out on site.

Instead of creating something new, you are starting from a standard and revising it along the way from the perspective of looking at the unique aspects of this particular job execution.

So the kick-off question of starting a new job in standardized reality is: what is different this time?

Standardization represents a culture shift. Instead of generating new information each time, you rely on checking information.  Make appropriate adjustments, evaluate the process, and then revise the template for next time.

Creating Templates Library

This new approach to standardization includes:

• Detailed, high-quality templates for every single job, project, responsibility, job, or initiative with step-by-step information on what needs to get done and who will do it.
• An accessible database of standard templates that are ready to use when needed.
• A thorough review of templates and standards to continually improve and adjust.

After a template library exists, then the process for any new project or initiative is simple—you select a relevant template, review and adjust it, and move forward. No time is wasted on defining what we need to do. It is clear what needs to be done, so all energy can be directed towards accomplishing it.

As we see standardized approach requires an up-front time investment into the template library. Creating and maintaining the templates is a key job in each company and so adequate resources should be devoted to it. Having a detailed and accessible database library of standard templates will help companies go from creating from scratch each time to simply adjusting and revising based on the needs of the current project.

When companies invest in standardization, they can increase efficiency and quality while reducing errors, mistakes, and wasted time.

How to Introduce Standardization for Safety Management

Companies interested in standardization need to invest time and money into creating their template library. It’s a long-term project and needs to be done systematically, with strong attention to detail. Leadership should prioritize time to complete the project, but also invest in staff and professionals who have administrative, project management, and organizational expertise to help build the template library.

The standardization process is as follows:

1. Start with a vision: Standardization is a culture shift, and everyone needs to be on board with the changes. It’s important that companies see this as a necessary change and part of Lean principles.
2. Prioritize: Start with areas of your operations that are the highest risk and, therefore, the most key areas to improve. You can also prioritize what is most used or the most important areas of your operations.
3. Determine responsibilities: Create a clear outline of who will be responsible for what area of the standardization and template process.
4. Define metrics: How will you know you’re successful? Consider what metrics are important to your company and build them into the standard templates.
5. Evaluate: Each time you use a standard template, evaluate its efficacy. These evaluations should also be standardized, too, so that you collect the same data each time.
6. Revise: Based on the evaluation, revise and adjust the templates as needed. This is an essential piece of the process and ensures that the library is kept up-to-date at all times.

A future next step might also be to share templates within the company with different departments. And, depending on the company’s market position, it may also be possible to share across companies, too. There is a willingness, even between fierce competitors, to collaborate in the safety domain. Since the goal is to reduce the need to generate and create something new each time, sharing and repurposing standard templates should always be a priority.

Conclusion

Standardization is a modern approach to safety management that incorporates Lean values while addressing the challenges faced by companies today. Having a detailed and accessible database library of standard templates will help companies go from creating from scratch each time to simply adjusting and revising based on the needs of the current project.

To move towards standardization, companies need to start with the vision and understand the difference this process can make. From there, they can follow a systematic process of standardization of their operations. It will transform their overburdened employees, maximize efficiency, and help them reach company goals in achieving Operational Safety Excellence.

Safety agreements come in various forms: from legal and internal regulations to production process descriptions, customer contracts, workers carrying out their work as instructed, employers providing their employees with adequate guidance and protection, and maintaining a suitable maintenance program for heavy machinery.

Teams closely monitor agreements by internal and external auditing to remain compliant. However, the desirable level of Compliance is achieved when everyone follows safety standards without direct supervision.

In this article, we will discuss how to engage people at plants to maximize Compliance with rules and regulations for a safer and more effective production environment.

Why it is so hard to be compliant

Safety-minded professionals are aware of how crucial Compliance checks are. Yet, when you start talking with safety experts about their approach to safety audits, you will immediately capture boredom in their eyes. Nobody finds this topic interesting or inspiring.

From one perspective, that is explained by the fact that compliance checks execution often overloads operations and day-to-day activities. It requires continuous effort and tracking to understand and overview the production surrounding and identify deviations clearly.

Furthermore, the high level of responsibility associated with the performance of a Compliant process creates extra tension on the shop floor.

So Compliance checks are often a painful part of Safety professionals’ jobs.

Compliance is more than following rules

However, the Operational Safety Excellence domain considers Compliance an opportunity to investigate processes for creating potential improvement opportunities and engaging the team on Safety topics.

To ensure this happens, we need two essential ingredients:
1. There is a joined vision on Compliance, driving everyone’s behavior
2. There is a safety management system that dictates the Compliance

While working on achieving the maximally possible level of Compliance, the team usually eliminates hurdles that prevent from following the rules and thus removes non-value-adding activities, getting a better leaner flow in return as a side effect.

Let’s overview these ingredients in detail below.

Ensuring joined vision on Compliance

For years, paper permit-to-work handouts were the main items on safety experts’ desks. However, a massive wave of digitalization and higher standards of efficiency are changing this path. 

Many EHS experts still prefer paper. “It is just bigger,” says one of the Unite-X clients, an EHS leader in a global corporation, unfolding a large sheet of paper with a printed version on it. I immediately see everything I need.”

It is hard to argue that a small-screen tablet provides less space for an overview. However, digital permit-to-work software offers many other benefits that outweigh the print size.

In this article, we investigate the impact of digitalization on the permitting process and how digital permits exceed paper in helping to achieve Operational Safety Excellence.

Paper Permit-to-Work problems

If you walk into a large production site where paper-based security regulation is still in place, it is fascinating to observe their archive. You will most likely see towers of paper on the desks of Safety Department folks and folders with sticky notes indicating the time and date of the documentation.

For audit, this is everything from inconvenience to a real nightmare. Auditors usually pick a random document from those piles. However, getting valuable information about the real situation of plant safety, especially in dynamics, is close to impossible.

However, an audit is only one perspective of the issue. Paper-based Permit-to-Work process often has a bad reputation as a source of frustration for the people who work with it daily because of:

• Lack of overview for leading people to make decisions
• Inaccurate or poor information communication
• Incorrect measures or unclear descriptions caused by incorrect work permits
• High costs caused by unnecessary waiting times, especially for contractors
• Mismatches in the execution of processes among the various teams and plants due to unclear rules
• High risk of people breaching rules caused by unworkable procedures

In our (Unite-X) practice, we saw cases where teams shared the observation that the other team had a different “style” of creating permits, which made communication harder. Instead of solving up-to-date issues, they first needed to translate the permit into the “language” understandable by everyone in the daily meetings.

Hands up here: Simply transferring from paper to an electronic permitting system does not immediately solve these issues. The solutions lie mainly in proper process design. Let’s take a look at how the process should be built to move closer to Operational Safety Excellence.

1. Lean

If you walk into any plant in the world in the morning, you’ll usually find workers waiting around for the permits necessary to do their jobs. Instead of working hands-on, they might spend anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes every morning just waiting for permits to be approved and issued. This is not an efficient use of anyone’s time or money!

Plus, workers may be anxious to start their jobs once the permits are assigned, or they might feel uninspired and disengaged from their work. They might also feel pressure to rush into their work to make up for the lost time. It can be hard to plan ahead for their day, so they might grab more material than they need for their assigned task. This leads to increased waste and risk of incidents at the site.

Instead, applying lean methodologies improves safety performance and reduces waste in safety processes.

2. Standardized

Within the standardizing principles lies the idea that every abnormality in the process signals a potential error.

As a tool that people use in their day-to-day routines, the Permit to Work process needs to be standardized. Permitting process utilizes practices and procedures that are constantly re-used. It is important to have a deep level of standardization so shifts can come and use the tool, knowing precisely what needs to be done.

A standardized way of handing out permits by using pre-defined templates, by default compliant with corporate regulations, also frees up the time and effort necessary to kick off the continuous improvement mindset of the team.

“Without standards, there can be no kaizen.” This famous quote, attributed to Taiichi Ohno, is also very relevant to the Permit-to-Work process. If you want to learn more about the role of standardization in Operational Safety Excellence, download the white paper here.

3. Measurable

Strong, data-driven processes should be the basis for good, efficient decision-making. Therefore, it is important to build a process that will allow us to capture and measure the performance of Permit to Work from all possible perspectives.

Measurement and re-measurements help to extract necessary data for your site to:

• Create reachable goals and long-term objectives
• Understand any deviations from those goals and objectives
• Measure progress towards those goals and objectives
• Understand the root cause of any issues, should they arise
• Meaningfully benchmark results

Moreover, a proper measurement system will help to identify “waste” as non-value-adding activities and to re-balance effort towards value-adding.

How to move the organization through the change with confidence

Production plants for Chemicals, Food, Pharma, etc., need to perform changes all the time — whether the change is in a shift organization, a new process or product introduction, equipment replacement, or another type of change.

Production plants are designed to be safe for the people who work there and the surrounding, so running organizational or technical changes through the safe path must be managed exceptionally well. Before executing a change, the risks of that change must be known and evaluated. Only then can the organization move forward with confidence.

Keep reading to learn more about what makes for effective and safe change management.

Why is good management of change important?

Whether big or small change occurs, every site must go through certain phases, including proposing, approving, implementing, and checking a change.

There are many perspectives to consider in the change process. For example, different specialties like electrical, mechanical, safety, and process are all people who need to work together on their piece of the change and give the change their blessing. The critical question they seek to answer is always will this change introduce any new risks?

Additionally, there should always be someone overlooking the entire change process to balance these perspectives and ensure nothing is overlooked. There are many factors and perspectives to consider for each change, and each change can have a significant impact on the overall process, flow, efficiency, and safety of a site. The management of change procedure should support everything goes as smoothly as possible.

How to define a change?

It is essential to define what we consider a change.

How “big” or “small” the change is determined by the level of risk it introduces. If the plant starts using a new pen in the office, that is probably too small to be managed as a change. Though sometimes, a tiny change can introduce enormous risks. One wrong spare part can bring down an airplane. The key is recognizing changes and adequately assessing the risks they could trigger.

It is a valuable exercise to look in maintenance management systems or permit to work systems to review jobs described there and check whether the job is actually about executing a change. It tells you something about the effectiveness of the organization in recognizing changes.

Once we define a change and identify which events should be managed as a change, it is also essential to decide how to manage them.

Having a single approach to managing changes usually is insufficient. Often when employees find the procedure of submitting low-risk change requests too complex, they tend to bypass it. Thus to handle different types of change fast and smoothly enough, the approach should be agile, and .changes need to be managed differently depending on the scope, complexity, and risk involved in the change.

A hurdle to innovation

One of the downsides of an ineffective change management process is that it prevents innovations. Innovations trigger changes at all levels, technical, behavioral, cultural. While change occurs, it is crucial to keep current processes running smoothly without introducing new risks.

Moreover, if people know that the existing process of managing changes does not support them enough, and thus, changes cause a rise in stress level, hassle, massive documentary work, and extra pressure on safety measures, they may resist the change. The fact that the process’s complexity is high can also result in changes being lost. Somebody is reviewing but not clear who that is. How many changes do you have hanging somewhere halfway?

As a result, those who might benefit from innovation prefer to keep the “oldie, but goodie” status quo.

Why should a site implement management of change software? 

There are many benefits to implementing management of change software on–site. 

How communication in production impacts safety and efficiency.

In many significant safety incidents, like the BP Texas City refinery or Piper Alpha explosions, the information flow during shift handover played a significant role. When there is an information backlog, not everyone is aware of what’s going on in the plant—things can easily go wrong.

Not everybody sees improving the communication between shifts as an opportunity to raise production effectiveness, which helps to save money or enhance safety culture and produce Operational Safety Excellence.

Communication errors can cost a lot of money. As a simple example: if a task is missing in quality control, a batch might be labeled as lower quality and will need to be sold at a lower price. 

In this article, we overview the true place of production communication in the safety and efficiency balance puzzle, what are challenges arise while solving it and how to plant management can address them. 

Better informed people make better decisions 

Picture a typical shift handover in the morning: The person coming off their shift stands together with the person coming onto their shift for no more than 10 minutes. They look over the screen together and go over what is happening in the production area. 

They’ll often say that the shift was uneventful, and there is not a lot to discuss. If anything noteworthy happened, they might write it down in a little notebook or log.

But in this situation, there is probably a lot of information that is being left out. Data is also exchanged through in-person chatter, emails, and more. And sometimes, scrawlings in a notebook might be misunderstood by the next person. Or by a later Shift when they are trying to solve an issue.

So even if the following shift-start meeting is structured, information might be missing. 

Thus becoming well-informed becomes a lengthy process.

Getting up to speed on what’s going on in the production plan is a big pain point for many plants. It can take hours to figure out the real situation in the plant. What is different than usual? What needs to happen?

Shift handover can be ineffective because there can be a lack of structured communication between shifts and other layers of the organization, and reports can lack crucial details.

To minimize safety incidents and achieve Operational Safety Excellence, plants need to cut down the time it takes to exchange information.

Standardized shift handover = safer = efficient

If everything always happens the same way, extra time and effort can be saved through standardization. From the other angle, within the standardizing principles lies the idea that every abnormality in the process signals a potential error. From this point of view, “unstandardized work = potential error” is a true statement. So how standardized and reliable are your shift changes?

Another thing about recurring actions is that they could be captured, described, and used to train people. Thus you might assume that there would be no surprises.

But, in reality, in a vulnerable environment, plants must consider everything going on in and around the job. There are countless possible factors and situations you have to account for. And surprises still might come!

Being a core principle of Operational Safety Excellence, standardized work makes processes not only effective but also safe.

Working with standardized processes enables shifts to spread the knowledge consistently and share experience, capture lessons learned, and cooperate for joined continuous improvement while embracing and appreciating the current state of the plant.

Let them talk to each other in a structured way

Think of each shift change like a baton pass. 

It can be challenging to share a job with other shifts, as different shifts often have their own cultures and even styles. Sometimes things can even get a little competitive or tribal, and teams might develop individual goals.

While the different shifts have a shared responsibility to keep things running, this can sometimes lead to a lack of responsibility on any one person or team. 

Since not everyone will arrive for their shifts at the same moment, it can be hard to always perform a detailed handover and talk to the relevant counterparts about what is going on. 

When shift handovers happen, they are usually one-on-one between two people. This is good when the information being passed is relevant for a single person or job role. However, some info is essential for the whole team.

Many supervisor roles are only day shifts, they are usually not present during night shifts, while critical daily meetings usually only happen once during the morning shift.

Therefore, supervisors need to understand all the handover details and relay that information to their team quickly. Looking through the logs and going through a quick 10-minute handover often doesn’t provide enough structured information.

In this article, Sjoerd Nanninga describes “waste” one can eliminate from safety processes to make them leaner and thus more effective.

This is the second article of the Unite-X safety talks series. We discuss how to apply lean methodologies to safety processes to improve production performance and increase people’s engagement.

You can read the first article in the Safety Talk series about the relationship between lean and safety here.

Sjoerd Nanninga:

“In the production and maintenance domain, we see a lot of valuable applications of lean principles.

Organizations create value by reducing waste and focusing on customer success, doing the right things in a company.
But still, we see that these processes in the safety domain are in some way excluded from lean and lean thinking, which is strange.

We created this domain called Operational Safety Excellence (OSE), which is basically about applying lean methodologies to safety processes.

When you start discussing applying lean to safety, usually there is a bit of pushback because people start saying: ‘Well, we do not want to cut corners on safety and no cost reductions; we want to spend the time we want to invest in safety.’

But, lean is about real value by focusing on the parts of the processes that add value and reducing the parts that do not add value.

Safety processes can be greatly improved. We have measured situations at over 500 plans, and basically, we see there is still a lot of waste in those safety processes. This amount of waste affects efficiency, compliance and quality.”

The aspects and Effects of Waste 

Waiting time

“One of the categories of waste in lean philosophy is of course waiting time. This is called ‘Time on Hand’.

It means that workers would be standing around waiting for the next step to be fulfilled. 

If you walk into nearly every plant in the world in the morning, contractors and maintenance people are waiting to start their jobs. Generally, they are waiting for isolation activities and permits to be ready and then hand it out. 

Usually it’s very common that these people wait 60 minutes 90 minutes until their job can finally start. 

Looking at this from the aspect of efficiency, these guys are waiting but instead should be working with tools (hands on tool time).”

Quality in the blinds effect

“Viewed from a quality perspective: waiting times have efficiency effects because people could be working instead of waiting.

But, there’s also the ‘quality in the blinds effect’, because if people are waiting a lot for a long time until they can finally start, later on, they tend to be rushed, causing them to be unfocused on a task and more prone to make a mistake.”

Access inventory

“One of the other well-known types of waste in lean is access inventory. 

What we noticed in a number of larger plants is that there is a tendency to create a huge stockpile of isolation materials for lockout tagout try out.

If there is no organized process – structurally – when performing an isolation, people don’t know the exact material they need. Without knowing this, you cannot make a plan. The result is that people tend to take a lot of material, and with many ongoing activities every day, they will need more material.

Then, there is also the added non-benefit of carrying much stuff around the plant. So waste all around.” 

Unused employee activity

“The final category usually mentioned in lean methodology is unused employee activity, which means losing value caused by unengaged employees. 

This is extremely important in the operational safety processes because it happens at shop floor: where the work is performed and where the risks are. 

Having unengaged people during safety processes can be very dangerous.”

Role of standardization in safety

Image: The formation of safety culture in an organization

Safety

Creating and embracing a safety culture amongst sites of manufacturing organizations demands a high level of engagement from every person involved.

To achieve this, organizations need to develop a consistent safety culture and spread it across all the facilities globally, ensuring that this culture fits local specifics. 

In its turn, working with standardized processes enables sharing experience, capture lessons learned, and cooperate for joined continuous improvement.

A standard

While standardization is the activity of making standards, there are numerous definitions of the term ‘standard’ used in the industry. In this paper, standardization is observed as a part of making production more lean and safe. 

Thus in this paper, we rely on the definition that connects these two domains:

A standard is an approved specification of a limited set of solutions to an actual or potential matching problem, prepared for the benefits of the party or parties involved, balancing their needs, and prepared and intended to be used repeatedly or continuously for a certain period by a substantial number of parties for whom they are meant.

To decompose this definition from the lean perspective standard has the following characteristics: 

• • • It is an approved specification 
    • It has a limited set of solutions 
    • It solves the actual or potential problem 
    • It is used repeatedly and continuously 
    • It is used for a certain period of time 
    • It is used by a substantial number of parties. 

A standard must consider the users’ needs, and the usage of the standard must be beneficial. 

Aside from that, standardized work is the focus of lean manufacturing. Thus concluding from the definition of standard, standardization is necessary for organizations that seek to elevate their safety to the next level.

Lean

Within the standardizing principles lies the idea that every abnormality in the process signals a potential error. At the same time, one of these principles is to avoid waste. 

Additional safety measurements may result in additional procedures and when these procedures are not efficient, they form a process waste. Ironically, this triggers risks instead of preventing them. For example, long waiting times due to failed planning can result in rushed behavior in the maintenance process, not rarely at the expense of safety. 

Standardizing safety procedures can prevent causing inefficient safety procedures to become waste. Based on the definition stated in the previous chapter and looking from the lean perspective, these are the benefits gained: 

• • • To achieve maximal efficiency by uncovering and eliminating: 
      • • Unnecessary workforce 
        • Inefficient costs 
        • Waiting time 

• • • To achieve a higher level of safety by achieving 
      • • Fewer incidents 
        • Less frustration 
        • Fewer possibilities for unnecessary risk-taking 

• • • To roll out the process across sites globally: 
      • • To gain insights on how the corporate standard is applied locally 
        • To align in the understanding of process steps 
        • To develop a common perception of risk identification 

• • • To set up flows of knowledge exchange amongst teams: 
      • • To close the loop of lessons learned incorporation 
        • To review and adopt new developments 
        • To implement improvement ideas 

Going further down at the level of widely used safety operations, like Permit to Work or LoToTo, standardization brings: 

• • • Necessary support for users in understanding and applying procedures
      • • Procedures translated into content and rules 
        • Rules translated into work instructions 
        • The first-time action performed right 
    • Improvement compatibility with other processes 
    • Possibility to monitor and review performance 
      • • To benchmark and compare between sites 
        • To benchmark and compare across the industry 
    • Simplified communication with contractors 

As described above, there are numerous reasons to standardize safety procedures.

Conclusion

So, when done well, standardization decreases ambiguity and guesswork and increases employee morale.

When implemented successfully, standardization brings measurable improvements in important processes of an organization, such as planning, designing processes, quality of output, and compliance.

Unite-X considers standardization as an essential step towards Operational Safety Excellence.

Author: Sjoerd Nanninga

In this article managing director Sjoerd Nanninga writes about the X-factor in safety. This article was originally posted on LinkedIn. 

Author: Sjoerd Nanninga

In this article managing director Sjoerd Nanninga writes about the X-factor in safety. This article was originally posted on LinkedIn. 

The X-factor in safety

X is where everything starts

An X always draws attention.

When my kids and I are playing pirates, we have a map with an X on it.
X is where everything happens, and you need to go there to get the treasure. It is the X where the action is.

My search for this magical X-factor that makes productions safer has brought me few insights that I strive to share.

Go and see yourself

In the lean manufacturing theory, there is this concept of Genchi Genbutsu, which means ‘go and see for yourself’.

In the lean practice, this means there are two major, significant implications:

1. 1. First, you need to make your decisions based on observations and data. Not on hunches, beliefs, feelings, or personal preferences. Go to X and see.
   2. Secondly, decisions about critical processes – including safety processes – should be made by the people involved. The people who are at X.

This way, the people with knowledge about what is going on have the power to decide.

Suppose you want to understand what’s going at a site. Take the time to visit the control rooms at night a couple of times. Get the guys a coffee, let them make fun of you, shut up and listen.

Here is my field story about being at the X

I once had a crash course in Genchi Genbutsu. I was flying to an offshore production platform, and I was accompanying a manager that came on shift.

He was a silent man in the beginning. Let’s say he needed to warm up to me, maybe. But we started talking, and at the end of the helicopter flight he told me:

“if you want to learn something, stay within 2 meters for the next two hours after landing”.

We spent the first half-hour together with the crew that was leaving.

They had intense conversations because they were trying to bring over two weeks of data, facts, and information (maybe even three weeks of data in some cases) to the arriving crew.

So, there’s a lot to learn and know about what happened over the last two weeks: potential risks, what is going on everywhere, etc. During this briefing, the helicopter was waiting on the deck, so there was a lot of time pressure.

Right after the ‘leaving crew’ left, the manager went outside to check all the decks. The first thing he checked was a tiny leak, which he noticed in the last hour of his previous shift. The leak was still there. Just a couple of drops were going into the sea.

But one drop pollutes 1000 liters of water. So, continuing that has a huge effect. The loop was not closed, so this was a small mistake. But this small mistake can become a bigger problem when not fixed.

Lessons learned at the X

The lesson was learned. I realized how challenging it is to control such a complicated combination of equipment and to execute actions.

I learned a lot that day and also in the years that followed stands on sides around the world. Sitting in control rooms and going with everybody to see what is going on gave me many insights.

Small mistakes and inefficiencies happen every day.

With my own eyes, I saw how these mistakes and inefficiencies, which are often SMALL, grow fast as a snowball when you sum them up.

So, how could you prevent those?

X is where you should be

When people at the work spot (at the X, remember?) make decisions, they influence processes directly. Thus they prevent unwanted things from happening.

If you allow and empower them to take control of safety processes, that will create real magic.

***

However, the story about X is not over.

The X also is about connections, tightening knots, and making solid nets of expertise.

Let’s talk about this next time.

To read the second part, click on this link.

Lean and Safety: are they friends or foes?

Working safe or working lean?

If you talk to people in plants, safety has a reputation of slowing things down.   

When you ask people, they will reply in utter frustration: “Sometimes we have a 5–minute job and it takes you 3 or 4 hours to do the safety preparation, get the proper authorizations in place, find our managers to ‘OK’ everything and then we’re waiting, waiting, waiting and then we do our 5-minute job.”  

“So, safety and maintenance can be frustrating and certainly can at times feel totally ‘not lean.”

This was purely about the experience of people in plants, but what we also see organizationally, is that in large corporations they are a huge group of internal consultants.  

People working with lean methodologies in improving important the performance of plants, and domain that these guys look at – so that the black belts and the green belts – is usually totally unrelated to safety.  

They are focused on manufacturing or maintenance and maybe sometimes also on the financial and the logistical side of things, but safety is like a separate domain and there’s very little into a mingling of the methodology of lean and the application of that in safety.

How lean methodologies could improve safety performance?

There are a number of ways in which lean can be applied to safety to increase performance.  

“One of the biggest things is that the focus of lean is to standardize work.”

Thus, whenever there’s a situation where you have a process in which there is variation, you are at risk: that’s kind of the definition of variation.   

For example, if you look at your maintenance job and you’re looking at the quality of the risk assessment of their job and all the mitigating factors included, if you have variation in the quality, then you will need to have a loss of checks and balances and everybody needs to look at it.  

So you have a lengthy process in place in order to come to a good safe situation.  

Thus, if you can have a more standard standardized process with a standard way of approaching these types of jobs and everybody in the organization does it the same way, then with much less effort and much less throughput time you can get to an even higher quality of those risk assessments.  

Applying principles of standardizing jobs – and standardizing also the job process – means that you can get a big increase both in quality of the safety – in terms of compliance and also the quality of the assessment– but also make it much more efficient.

By the way, read our article about standardization in safety here.

How does working lean creates value?

The major value creation in lean work happens due to the elimination of waste. 

Lean is famous for waste reduction. The process by which we reduce waste is continuous improvement.  

Continuous improvement for me means looking really well at an organization (and the processes that go on in an organization) and then making small adjustments until it gets better and better.  During and after that process you always keep looking for improvements. This is why it’s continuous improvement. In our experience, most safety processes consist of a lot of waste. There is a lot of waiting time and people rewrite or redo stuff all the time. 

“Safety usually consists of a lot of waste.”

These things can be very costly, especially the misalignment between departments and people can cost a lot of money. Also, this kind of waste can also be risky at times.  These are the things that we need to eliminate.  

Secondly, what also sometimes happens, is that downtime in plants is longer than it actually needs to be because of these misalignments.  By working through these aspects of waste and removing them also the safety processes can be more value-driven and get to a higher quality level with fewer costs. 

People first

One of the key pillars in lean is the engagement of people.  

The engagement of people starts with respect. Really truly understanding as to the leadership of an organization, is that the people that work in those processes daily are the true experts in their fields.  So, any improvement that you’re going to implement into an organization is going to start with these people.  

They have to first sense, feel and own that there are things to improve and that there’s a possibility or value creation. And then also those improvements should be designed and implemented by the people on the shop floor.  And that will make it a lasting situation.

“Leadership is there to support because as the leaders in the organization they should show their respect and trust in their people, that they can actually do the work.”

Because if you are managing an operational organization the biggest responsibility that you have is the safety of the people that work in your organization; the externals and internals that come to your plant. You are responsible for their safety.  What you need to do is trust that you have people with expertise and you have to trust the process of continuous improvement.

Positive impact on both safety and efficiency

There’s still this big separation between the safety professionals on one side and the leading professionals within manufacturing organizations on the other side.  So, what we think is that those communities and those ways of thinking should really come together.

“This means that the people in the safety domain should really get themselves trained and involved in understanding lean and lean methodology. They should have a good feeling about how to implement continuous improvements also in the safety processes.”

On the other side, lean professionals in those organizations usually do not look at the safety processes. but I think that’s a mistake because there is a lot of value to be gained and a lot of ways to be reduced in those processes.   

If you take them on board you can make great combinations with other processes and optimize the whole plant to a new level.  So, I think it’s just a great domain to look at how we can combine stuff, learnings from two sides.

Conclusion: lean and safety are friends!

We definitely see that safety gives great opportunities to improve efficiency by eliminating even more waste, while lean allows safety experts to implement continuous improvement strategies.

We at Unite-X call this domain Operational Safety Excellence as a connecting domain between safety and lean.

About Unite-X

Instead of looking at safety measures as waste or ‘noise’, Unite-X has developed a philosophy that focuses on how safety aspects and lean processes can reinforce another.  This strategy is what we call Operational Safety Excellence (OSE). 

We at Unite-X promote three sub-domains to be crucial parts of the strategy of Operational Safety Excellence.  

These are:

1. Standardization  
2. Reduction of maintenance downtime 
3. People engagement

Read more about the Unite-X solution here.