Safety Software Isn’t Just for Safety Anymore

We recently published a Manufacturing Case Summary relating a great success story that made our customer happy and all of us proud – see below.  The basic storyline is that safety programs that meaningfully include employees contribute significantly to positive safety outcomes.  But there is an even more interesting trend coming out of this experience shared by other customers: effective safety programs don’t just support safety, so to channel my inner Paul Harvey, “…and now for the rest of the story.”

Most industry professionals have recognized for years that safety programs are constrained when they are siloed. The more integrated safety becomes with operations, the more value safety brings to the organization.

This happens because of a known dynamic: broader participation leads to more awareness/more eyes – the safety system provides leverage to extend the skills and knowledge of the safety team, but also those of all employees, which in turn begins to bring about a culture of making things better.  The positive trend of continuous improvement of safety performance, resulting in decreased losses from incidents, expands into more generalized awareness of opportunities to improve operations, leading to improved productivity.

Clearly this is a journey that takes time.  It is dependent on where that company’s culture is at the start of the journey and the degree of commitment and support of management.  But it is most certainly available to any organization.