Making Security a Top Priority for the entire Operation

In this special post, Plant Lean Manager Todd Markward from Select Convenience(manufacturer of Sleep Number and Comfortaire beds),shares how his team made a couple of simple improvements to their worth stream mapping procedure that moved the whole operation’s focus to safety as a top concern.

I’ve served as a Lean/Operational Excellence Manager for a number of years with obligation for single and multi-site operations. A common practice is to create value stream maps(VSM)for each site that help us prioritize and manage the business. With time I observed that they were missing safety as a crucial part of “waste” and Secret Performance Indication (KPI) in our organisation. We had stopped working to resolve this waste stream in our VSM information, particularly in very first help cases and lost work days.

The lean principle of regard for people implies that safety needs to always be our very first issue. We aim to promote this principle with an environment that secures our employees. Any time a safety occurrence occurs, that line stops – so product circulation and pull processes stop too.

However this principle wasn’t precisely measured on our VSMs. The VSMs did not include safety wastes such as downtime for security occurrences, follow-up examinations, changes, documents updates, and worker change management training. We would determine security kaizen opportunities on our VSMs, however neither our information obstructs nor other visuals on the VSMs highlighted the safety waste stream, occurrence places, or recognized enhancements. I decided to start try out methods to efficiently record and display security metrics on the VSMs. I collaborated with our various departments to collect information, generating our first plant-wide VSM. I wished to reveal what was taking place in safety on our present state map and have our future state map show the safety improvement plans along with inventory, flow and cycle time strategies.

I accomplished this by adding the combined variety of very first help and lost work days in each process data block on the VSM. I then included blocks under the timeline ladder to the total number of occurrences in each process column, and the total the number of events on the best side of the ladder as we made with lead time and process time (see photo listed below).

These simple additions would spread the security focus from exclusively on the operator to the entire operation. We could now visualize it as our primary KPI.

We are now starting our 2nd year of value stream mapping with these improvements and they are working as prepared. While we are lucky to have a low variety of safety incidents at our place, we are enjoying proactive gain from this impactful modification. Safety is now at the forefront of our discussions. All team members are rapidly able to see the present state of security and our continuous dedication to be a safe operation.