Skip to main content

SAFE, EFFICIENT AND PROFITABLE PRODUCTION

Managing safely is synonymous to safe and efficient production. Yet not many businesses make that connection until it’s too late. All too often they suffer a death blow before sitting down to examine what went wrong.

Experience shows that Managers who pay little attention to safety only end up paying a big time price attending to all kinds of post-incident business loss activities. Issues like absenteeism, lost workdays, spiraling medical bills, sagging public image, poor workforce morale, increase insurance premiums, dwindling production and a shrinking bottom line.

It follows that poor safety performance directly translates to poor returns on investment and you don’t have to look too far to see it or why. It’s clearly signposted all over the workplace place; in the employees’ body language, asset use and misuse, mounting unresolved environmental issues, etc. Like they say, you can run but you can’t hide because safety issues are like a pack of dominoes, one falls and they all fall. Therefore put your best foot forward first time and always, manage safety in the business as if your life depends on it for it may well be. If you do not have a full operational safety plot of all the elements at the onset then you may just find that you’re hitching up the wrong wagon before long. Your people, asset and the environment must be congruent for anything worthwhile to result from the venture. Otherwise you may have to start all over again to your chagrin, and at some irreversible costs.

There are people who tend to view managing safety in the business as an add-on luxury because it costs money. Money, they feel is better spent elsewhere, namely; production. But they forget it is all integrated and that money begets money.

Everything is interrelated in the workplace; tools, personnel and the work environment itself. The tripod cannot stand without one of its three legs and so it is with the three elements of workplace safety: tools, personnel and the work space. And it doesn’t matter how clever you may be because there is no way around it. Safe Tools + Safe Personnel + Safe Environment = Safe Production. QED.

Some may think that safe production is a matter of ‘I know my job’ but that’s not enough. For one thing, if you didn’t know your job you’ll be out of employment anyway so that’s not the issue because the very fact that you know your job does not mean that the next fellow down-the-line knows his or hers. That’s the sum total of it because if all the elements are not in consonance the end result will be less than optimal since we’ll  end up with influences  at variance or in opposition instead of working together to achieve smooth, safe production.

One of the best ways to manifest competence is in safe work delivery because competent people know that without safe processes, tools and techniques, there can hardly be any production worth talking about. Competency means people are able to read the game, break it down in its various component parts to identify and isolate those steps that might throw spanners in the works if inadequately managed or resolved prior.

It’s simply illogical to expect to reap bountiful profits from a business where the active instruments of production are in themselves haphazardly strewn together. Safety in the business must be a conscious and deliberate effort for it to pay.

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

THAT 5-MINUTE PEP TALK BEFORE THE JOB

There are pep talks and there are pep talks. Over the years, I've had the privilege of observing pep talks all day long on seismic crews, construction sites, production platforms, processing plants, wire line, drilling operations, rig moves and so on. But not once have I left not feeling maybe the crew could have done better with the shape and content of the core messages thereof. This is because I am of the view that safety messages are only helpful if they are clear and to the point, with little or no ambiguity, if any at all. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Now 5-minutes is not a great deal of time for even the most gifted and skillful of speakers to nail  home  the key safety dos and don'ts of the job soon to commence. So most of these talks frequently average out to be sing songs and prayerful affairs in the end, with generalized 'messages' like be 'your brother's keeper', 'safety is everybody's business', 'you all know

HOW MUCH DOES A NEAR MISS INCIDENT COST?

In 'ACCIDENT IS MONEY DOWN THE DRAIN', we tried illustrating  how a NOTHING HAPPENED near miss incident of a hammer accidentally slipping off a technician's grasp, falling through a considerable height and landing safely between two busy foremen, with no damage to property or injury to anyone on site resulted in so much useful production time loss. A conservative computation of the time-cost estimate showed what seemed to be a 'harmless' incident costing the site company management a hefty 3.4 Man-Days lost time in direct costs! The exercise ended without considering the 'POTENTIAL' of the occurrence. 'POTENTIAL' simply refers to the probability of a much more consequential outcome by chance or slightly altered circumstances given the number of people exposed to the threat at the time. This is usually what constitutes the difference between a 'NOTHING HAPPENED' incident, a disabling/ serious property damage one or a fatality . That th

How Much of Your Opex Do You Save Cutting Corners?

What % of your operating budget do you save when you look the other way while unauthorized changes and deviations are a norm in the workplace under your supervision? Would you 5, 10, 15 or maybe 30%? You are not too sure how much, if anything at all? Well, it is highly unlikely that you will ever save on your Opex if employees are free to make up their own rules as they go along or can decide which step on the job comes next instead of what the approved procedures say. In fact working with scant regards for the Right Way of doing things condemns you to an ever spiraling  operating budget spend. Because you'll find that you are constantly grappling with 'digging a hole to fill a hole' throughout the life of  the project. In the end, there are no prizes for guessing that your project will come in grossly over budget and way outside the delivery schedule because of all the issues of rework, unplanned stoppages, delayed logistics, repairs and replacements, backtracking, c