Safety Culture Excellence®

Today’s recording provides additional ideas, examples and covers the following topics:

• Value Stream Mapping Expanded
• Use of Kanban Tools
• Voice of the Customer
• Lean or Six Sigma, is the Debate Useful?
• Taking the problem into Gemba
• Potential Integration or Further Frustration?
• Timing & Support: They Are Absolutely Critical
• Doing the Right Things Rather Than Doing Things Right
• Topic Summary

Business locations are not just competing with outside organizations they are also competing to remain an asset of their own company. As a result, most organizations around the world are integrating lean principles into their business. This has become one of the most commonly used strategies to remain competitive. In our experience we have found that many companies are doing a lot of things in safety with no additional gains; generally more activities isn’t the answer. As the Lean Thinking saying goes “Doing the wrong thing very well is wasteful”. Lean means working smarter. Likewise, Lean Behavior Based Safety doesn’t mean less effort it means aiming more directly at desired rapid-results and ensuring the continuous improvement methodology, what we in ProAct Safety call a “Results Driven Change Philosophy”. This week’s Podcast is part two of the series Applying Lean & Six Sigma Principles to Behavior Based Safety.

It is hard to argue with the fact that in business, the only thing constant is change. In addition, as we all know, we had a few more resources available to us in the past, than in today’s lean environment. Aside from a few new names and some successful re-branding campaigns, Behavior Based Safety has changed little. While the approaches have certainly had some successful results, those results were a byproduct of reaching the goal which was to complete an implementation of Behavior Based Safety. Rather, than the goal being defined as ensuring (and being held accountable for), results. Change is needed for these technologies to be sustainable and supportable at all levels in the organization. The reality of today is you have to have a focus on both short-term and long-term results, if you are going to be successful at achieving Safety Culture Excellence. This three-part series is about those results. This Podcast published on 18 February 2008 also includes a reading of the article “Lean Behavior-Based Safety – How the Process is Evolving to Survive in Today's Economy” which was published in May, 2005. This article can be found by navigating to the following links: http://www.occupationalhazards.com or http://www.proactsafety.com