Category: Insights

What is the domain of Operational Safety Excellence?

What is Operational Excellence?

The operational excellence of an organization is the execution of its operations in an excellent way. Given two commercial companies with the same strategy, the operationally more excellent company will in general have better operational results, creating value for customers and shareholders. 

Combining Operational Excellence with Safety

The Operational Safety Excellence domain was initially explored by Unite-X (former IB&X) as a safety assurance platform focused on achieving a zero-incident strategy for large industrial industries.  

The domain was brought to life to fill the niche between the ever-growing pressure for organizations to comply with Health Safety and Environmental regulations and standards.  

While there have been various aspects to creating and maintaining a safe working environment, it is often challenging to implement efficient fail-safe systems and build them in the day-to-day routines. Operational Safety Excellence couples a straightforward zero-incident strategy with process optimization and cost reduction programs. 

Five principles of Operational Safety Excellence

• Lean manufacturing  

Lean manufacturing, or lean production, is a production method derived from Toyota’s 1930 operating model ‘The Toyota Way”. The term “Lean” was coined by John Krafcik (1988), and defined by James Womack and Daniel Jones (1996) to consist of five key principles: ‘Precisely specify value by specific product, identify the value stream for each product, make value flow without interruptions, let customer pull value from the producer, and pursue perfection.’.

The lean manufacturing methodology focuses on minimizing waste within production processes while simultaneously maximizing productivity. Instead of looking at safety measures as waste or ‘noise’, results have shown how safety aspects and lean processes can reinforce one another.  

• Process standardization 

Process standardization can be defined as the improvement of operational performance, cost reduction through decreased process errors, facilitation of communication, profiting from expert knowledge, and providing flexibility without sacrificing organizational controls.

The focus of lean manufacturing is standardized work. Within the standardizing principles, this means that every abnormality in the process signals a potential error. When standardizing your processes, working lean means applying principles that can help and be of value for the final quality of your safety processes. 

• People engagement 

To merge operational excellence with safety execution, people engagement is a key factor. A successful solution is not only supported by the management team, it is especially carried by the people who work with the system. 

• Production continuity 

Research has shown that downtime is mostly caused by maintenance. When analyzing the duration of maintenance as a whole, you can divide it into preparation/waiting time and actual working and maintenance time. Most of the preparation and waiting times are unnecessarily long and can be lowered by efficient planning and good preparation. 

• Operational excellence   

To effectively achieve full capacity under the safest circumstances, expertise in the domain of Operational Safety Excellence assures that safety processes are integrated into day-to-day production routines and maintenance environments. 

Insights 

The true value of managing safety goes beyond the reduction of the direct and indirect costs of serious injuries or the avoidance of catastrophic events.  

Firms that manage for safety are more successful and more sustainable because they are focused on operational excellence. Incidents are signs of deviations in the management system and indicate that production is not being managed correctly. 

When a business is properly managed for safety, this organization experiences higher production efficiency, higher production quality and provides higher returns for investors. 

Unite-X created the domain of Operational Safety Excellence.

To effectively achieve full capacity under the safest circumstances, expertise in the domain of Operational Safety Excellence assures that safety processes are integrated into day-to-day production routines and maintenance environments.

How applying lean methodologies could improve safety performance?

A safe work environment

“So, let’s ask ourselves how to create a safe work environment?

The way to turn an unsafe work environment around is to empower people at shop floor to make the decisions on these properties. Of course, with guidance and with rules. But you have to give people the responsibility to run these processes well.

Then, the magic begins.

When making people responsible, people can turn around and become really creative on how to solve their day-to-day issues. 

Occasionally, problems that have been reoccurring every day for 20 years are solved in a relatively short period of time.

After that, because people sort out these things themselves, they design something and commit to it. This is key because this ensures continuous improvement.”

Conclusion

In this article, Sjoerd Nanninga outlined briefly the types of waste that is present in safety processes. In the following articles, we are going to discuss these waste types with Sjoerd in more detail: how to identify them, and how to manage them.

The role of standardization in lean and safe manufacturing

What is a “standard” from a safety perspective? 

While standardization is the activity of making standards, there are numerous definitions of the term ‘standard’ used in the industry. Unite-X looks at standardization as a tool of making production more lean and safe.  

Thus in this article, we rely on the definition, introduced by Henk J. de Vries in his paper “Fundamentals of Standards and Standardization” as it connects these two domains:

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. 

Standardized work is 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 have similar reasons behind. 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:  

o Unnecessary workforce  

o Inefficient costs  

o Waiting time  

▪ To achieve a higher level of safety by achieving  

o Fewer incidents  

o Less frustration  

o Fewer possibilities for unnecessary risk-taking  

▪ To roll out the process across sites globally:  

o To gain insights on how the corporate standard is applied locally  

o To align in the understanding of process steps  

o To develop a common perception of risk identification  

▪ To set up flows of knowledge exchange amongst teams:  

o To close the loop of lessons learned incorporation  

o To review and adopt new developments  

o 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  

o Procedures translated into content and rules  

o Rules translated into work instructions  

o The first-time action performed right  

▪ Improvement compatibility with other processes  

▪ Possibility to monitor and review performance  

o To benchmark and compare between sites  

o To benchmark and compare across the industry  

▪ Simplified communication with contractors 

Conclusion 

Concluding above said, 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.