- Introduction
- Putting Theory into Practice
- Seeing the Whole Picture
- Integrate Safety
- Safety Impacts Widely
- You will Never 'Arrive'
-
Learning
from Japan
Introduction
I
first learned about Kaizen some 10 years ago
while working as a factory manager. After four years
previous experience as a corporate occupational health
& safety manager, I was finding life tough in the
world of production management. Then I was whisked off
to
I
was impressed by the Kaizen concept. Elegant in its
simplicity, it had been developed by
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But
what has all this got to do with health and safety?
It goes back to my time as a health and safety manager,
which was a rewarding and frustrating experience. I
recall being asked by a desperate production manager
what he could do about his high accident rate.
I was a bit green in those days,
but I knew enough to see clearly that his department
was chaotic due to his 'seat of the pants' style.
The
supervisors were not well respected, the working conditions
and housekeeping were poor, morale was low and there
were changing priorities and crises on the hour. Of
course there was a poor accident rate. It was a symptom
of poor management. But how could I tell him that?
I put on my philosophical thinking cap and came back to him with an answer that I knew in my heart was inadequate. It talked in vague terms about the compatibility between quality, productivity and safety and how you can't have one without the other, and so on.
He took one look and said: 'Yeah, right, but what do I have to do?' There is no quick answer in a situation like that.
I went away and learned about safety audits, accident investigation, hazard identification and all those good things. I found out that was the way you were expected to behave. You gave good advice, fed it into the system and let 'them' sort it out.
It made a difference if it was good advice and well presented, but basically your job was to spot problems. Safety was an extra to mainstream management activity. Productivity first, quality second and safety third (as long as there was nothing else).
Putting
theory into Practice
I
got bored after four years and asked for a change.
I wanted to put all my theories into practice in a
line management position. They gave me one.
Pretty soon, I was up to my neck in alligators with the rest of them. I wanted to improve morale, housekeeping, and the level of planning and organisation because I knew these things were important. I learned very quickly that you had to find space, in between fighting fires. You had to make time for 'prevention' activities that increased your sphere of influence and decreased the amount of urgent, pressing problems.
These were the things I used to talk to managers about when I was an oh&s manager -things like improving the recruitment process, standardising procedures, writing job instructions, giving training, listening to employee ideas, improving housekeeping simplifying the process.
I tried, but I only scratched the surface. However, this was the time I also learned about Kaizen, an eye-opening experience.
[ Return to Top ]Seeing
the Whole Picture
Kaizen
is a generic term describing a range of commonsense
techniques aimed at continuous improvement and elimination
of waste. If you want to understand it, you have to
be able to see the whole picture, not just the parts.
Kaizen is:
-
continuous improvement cycle
- simplifying the process
- reducing inventory
- Spotless housekeeping
- standardising methods
- employee involvement
- visible management
- problem visibility
- Total Quality Control
- just in time
- improved morale and safety
- elimination of wasted time and effort
In short, Kaizen is quality, productivity and safety. That's why it appealed so much to me and why I have carried it close to my heart since then. It is a way of achieving all of management's key objectives.
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Integrate
Safety
So
why do companies insist on talking about safety as if
it were some sort of moral crusade? Certainly, death
and serious injury is a morale issue, but why can't
we deal with the general issue of safety as an integral
part of good management without insisting it is a separate
activity?
Much is said these days about the link between Quality, Productivity and Safety. Good managers instinctively know the three go together. In a word, it's working Smart. You can't produce quality at a competitive cost in an untidy, unsafe environment. You can't have safety unless you are also in the business of producing quality product in a controlled, predictable environment. One set of activities requires the other. An injury to a person implies unnecessary strain or loss of control of the process. It also means there is damage occurring to the product and property a lot of waste and 'wheel spin'.
[ Return to Top ]Safety
Impacts Widely
I
can honestly say that in all the 20 years I have spent
in and around the work environment, I have never yet
seen, recommended or advocated any safety measure that
didn't have a positive impact on the general level of
organisation in the workplace.
Sure, you hear the anecdotes about the factory inspector who descends on the small machine shop and demands so much guarding that the poor proprietor is put out of business. You have to take such stories with a grain of salt, and the sure knowledge that if the factory inspector hadn't put them under, pretty soon something else would have.
So I ask again: why do we insist on treating safety as a separate activity? Some managers have taken the first step and tried to build safety into quality systems. Quality systems, as we all know, are largely destined to sit on the shelf. Why? Because priorities change. Businesses change. Quality standards change. Pretty soon, we're all fighting a new set of alligators. We 'arrived' only for a short, unfulfilling moment. All that effort sinking without trace.
[ Return to Top ]You
will Never 'Arrive'
What
was wrong was our mindset that, somehow, some day we
would finally 'arrive'. If we put together a manual
and did a bit of training, that would be it. Same with
safety. Raise the compliance level, get good at claims
management, appoint someone to lead and coordinate the
function (maybe even police it!) and we'd be
right. This all has some merit but it still misses the
point. When the gurus went to
In Kaizen, the central theme is continuously evaluating and improving the workplace to eliminate waste, in all its forms: wasted time, wasted energy, wasted material, wasted effort, and so on.
In other words, only doing activities that add value to the product. Those who have done Kaizen will know that this automatically leads to a highly ordered, neat, efficient workplace. Tasks are simplified and carried out in a smart, unhurried manner. People enjoy their jobs and contribute ideas. Standard procedures are used and are updated as methods evolve.
[ Return to Top ]Learning
from Japan
When
I learned Kaizen in the mid 1980s, I thought it would
be the next big thing to sweep through
In fact, very few businesses have understood. Instead, we have taken parts of the whole (like TQC, JIT, SQC) in an attempt to find the magic answer. We are squeamish about seeing the whole picture, probably because we think it's all some sort of unattainable Japanese culture. It's not. 'She'll be right" certainly does not fit in, but good old Kiwi ingenuity certainly does.
If you care about safety because you know it's an important indicator of the smartness of your organisation, and you are looking for a platform where quality, productivity and safety come together, it would pay to learn from the Japanese once again and in the process gain a competitive advantage over the also-rans.
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