Leading statement29 August 2014

Maintenance safety is being sacrificed as site leaders stake all on satisfying production quotas, the WM Factory Health and Maintenance Conference heard. Max Gosney and Ian Vallely reveal the uncomfortable truth behind manufacturing's disturbing maintenance accident statistics.

A mirror might not be the most obvious training aid for your next site safety tutorial. However, a moment of reflection could prove far more influential than an accident video nasty in changing your factory's safety culture, WM's Factory Health and Maintenance Conference heard.

"I don't doubt many of you will be running behavioural safety programmes," HSE chair Judith Hackitt (above) told almost 100 manufacturing maintenance managers gathered for the best-practice event at the Heritage Motor Museum, Gaydon. "I'm sure it will look at the behaviours of the people on the shopfloor and the somewhat strange things they do. But what about behavioural safety among managers and leaders? The people who determine where maintenance sits in the company hierarchy."

Managers who fail to practice what they preach
Statistics proved many senior managers still hadn't made the connection between their attitude and accident rates, Hackitt reflected. Almost a third of manufacturing fatalities were related to maintenance activity with a 'production at all costs' attitude a catalyst for casualties, she warned.

"Maintenance operations are not seen as part of the routine or part of the business," she added. "Safety will depend on maintenance teams not being under pressure from themselves or their management to fix machinery and get the factory going again quickly.

"Maintenance doesn't stop production – it's an integral part of building and retaining production integrity."

The symbiotic relationship between plant reliability and plant safety was explored by Andrew Fraser, MD of change management consultancy, Reliable Manufacturing. Fraser illustrated the link with accident data sourced from across the globe. "This graph is from a $10m US paper company. Over a five-year period, they compared their injury rate in red with their asset utilisation rate in blue. Every fall in the blue line corresponds with a rise in the red and vice-versa. Can you see some sort of relationship?," asked Fraser. "The more maintenance work that's planned and scheduled, the lower the injury rate," he said.

Maintenance technicians: not for the faint-hearted
Failure to plan maintenance activity places one employee in particular danger, Fraser added. "DuPont reported that the most likely person to be injured in one of their plants was a maintenance technician with less than two years' experience doing reactive work. Why was that person more vulnerable? Because the more experienced person is more familiar with all the workarounds."

However, in a plant permitting workarounds and shortcuts, not even the wiliest maintenance worker can stay safe for long. Peter Walsh, chief executive of the Society of Operations Engineers (SOE), offered a salutary tale from his experiences at an operational maintenance contracting company in Australia.

An operator, anxious not to be late for his son's birthday party, was attending an isolation procedure at the end of the day, revealed Walsh. Dressed in flip-flops and shorts for a speedier exit, the operator breached multiple safety protocols to fast track the repair job. Various workarounds later and the operator came into contact with a live 11Kv line, which blew the tip of his finger off, explained the SOE chief.

Turning a blind eye to blatant safety breaches
From poor scheduling of work to sleep-deprivation, a post-accident investigation threw up an encyclopaedic list of potential causes. But one factor stood out above all others for Walsh. "The thing that really hit home to me was that when this accident happened, we had a supervisor standing in the room talking with another worker. It wasn't just this one guy doing the wrong thing, it was a company culture. It was okay for our workers to walk around in electrical substations doing isolations without hard hats. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realise that's wrong."

Putting things right again takes a passionate and very public effort from managers, delegates heard. Chemicals and textiles manufacturer Milliken offered a benchmark in turning safety from a corporate buzzword into a company-wide belief.

"In 1981, Roger Milliken [then Milliken president] promised safety would be a priority," explained Paul Crabtree, quality engineer at the company's Best Factory Award-winning Bury site. "This means the first subject at board meetings is safety, the first item at senior leadership team meetings is safety and the first item of discussion at daily plant meetings is safety."

How to score a bull's eye with safety training
Not that Crabtree and his senior colleagues are the kind to kick the day off with didactic safety lectures. The Milliken engineer explained: "As far as engagement is concerned, we've found training can be repetitive: 'go watch this video of me lifting up these items in a safe way'. We've tried to change the way we do things."

Innovative activities include taping employees' thumbs up and then asking them to perform daily tasks like zipping up a coat to illustrate the devastating impact of hand injuries. Another training exercise sounds akin to a Damien Hirst exhibit: "We had an incident where someone was splashed by a chemical and wanted to show people what could happen if it got in your eye, " said Crabtree. "We got a bull's eye, dropped some acid on it, videoed it and showed it around the site. It was quite spectacular, though not for the squeamish."

Away from the lab, Crabtree can be found performing secret safety shopper walks. He will walk around while flouting safety protocol and see if anyone notices. Employees who challenge Crabtree are publicly recognised.

Milliken's vociferous safety focus came in stark contrast to the laissez-faire culture that contributed to Paul Mahoney severing his forearm during reactive maintenance at a Kent paper mill.

Culture change: it's all about you the manager
Mahoney, who opened the conference's afternoon session, suffered the traumatic injury while attending a machine breakdown in 2000. Contemplating the cause of the accident, he told delegates: "Everybody at the company, and I mean everybody – from myself, my shift mates and the management – all took things for granted," he recalled. "The management knew plant was blocking on a regular basis, but they did nothing about it. Because safety isn't a company's number one priority, production is. Safety isn't a priority, it's a value: you either believe in it or you don't."

And the time is nigh for you as a senior manufacturing manager to prove your faith, concluded Hackitt of HSE. "A change in safety performance comes about when you as leaders see maintenance as being about investment and improvement, not something that gets in the way... or has to be got through quickly and with your fingers crossed to avoid prosecution. Your mindset has a real and direct impact in safety performance because you determine the culture of the organisation."

Want to receive more top tips on implementing safety maintenance? Email mgosney@ findlay.co.uk to receive a link to all our Factory Health and Maintenance Conference speaker slides

Max Gosney

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