Culture improvement activities

Total Quality Management. Total quahty management (TQM) is the term which encompasses all of the continuous improvement activities with the goal of world class quahty. This corporate culture sets up the conditions for a climate favorable to companywide improvement. 

Standards are the baseline from which all continuous improvement activities can be measured. An example I often use is that of an order picker in a Toyota distribution center. I am not sure if the facts I use are correct, but that is inconsequential because what is important is the concept. Standard work for order pickers is 12 picks every 15 minutes. If in any 15-minute period they do not make their standard, they have to signal their supervisor. The supervisor immediately responds and approaches the order picker not to ask why he did not work to standard, but instead to ask what process problem, or problems, prevented him from making standard. Was the inventory count incorrect Was the inventory in the wrong location These and other questions will be asked until the problem is solved. This short, simple example demonstrates three distinct principles of lean respect for people, standard work, and a continuous improvement culture. Having defined standards that everyone understands enables the other two principles. Unlike this example, the actual workday of many supervisors is one spent firefighting rather than focusing on continual Improvement. Moving from one problem to the next fills their days because standards are unknown or not communicated. 

Tenacity around the encouragement of reporting and safety feedback from the workplace should be encouraged on an ongoing basis. Eventually the reporting and rectification of problems will become integrated into the day-to-day work process and will become part of normal activities rather than an added burden. This will indicate a positive safety culture improvement. 

This helped to clarify why the team was formed. Apparently the injury rates associated with the work task were unacceptable, so management decided to give it focus. This is reactive safety and is part of a good compH-ance-based safety program. Using the data (injury rates by type and location) to drive action is a continuous improvement activity that will help to reduce or eliminate the occurrences. I only mention this because in a continuous improvement (Lean Safety) culture, the risks may have been proactively identified and solutions put in place before the injuries occurred. However, since that was not the case here, I agreed to schedule a visit and assist them. 

Here, we have a primary theme of this Handbook. While behavior-based psychology provides methods and techniques to improve the human dynamics of safefy, principles from person-based psychology need to be considered to assure the behavior-based tools are used. The ultimate aim is to integrate behavior-based and person-based psychology so everyone participates in efforts to achieve a Total Safety Culture. In the ideal culture, everyone actively cares for the safety and health of others. 

Each of the above (and many other similar studies) has been, essentially, limited to improvement activities in individual mines or mining houses and are, as a result, at least context dependent. However, there have also been suggestions that indirect approaches to safety culture improvement can be encompassed within more widely appheable, less context dependent, techniques. For example, Purdy (2000) encompasses the indirect approach to safety culture improvement very elegantly by, in effect, stating that you can, to all intents and purposes, ignore safety culture initiatives and yet still improve it ... 

Leadership data is best understood in the context of the organizational culture in which the leader works the culture simultaneously provides the context and is the product of leadership s decisions and behaviors. Cultural data tell the leader where to direct his personal leadership improvement activities. 

A new generation of antiinflammatory agents having immunosuppressive activity has been developed. The appearance of preclinical and clinical reports suggest that these are near entry to the pharmaceutical market. For example, tenidap (CP-66,248) (12) has been demonstrated to inhibit IL-1 production from human peripheral blood monocytes in culture (55). Clinically, IL-1 in synovial fluids of arthritic patients was reduced following treatment with tenidap. Patients with rheumatoid or osteoarthritis, when treated with tenidap, showed clinical improvement (57,58). In addition to its immunological effects, tenidap also has an antiinflammatory profile similar to the classical NSAIDs (59). Other synthetic inhibitors of IL-1 production are SKF 86002 (20) andE-5110 (21) (55). 

Sucrose is often used as a decorative agent to impart a pleasing appearance to baked goods and confections (36). In jams and jeUies, sugar raises osmotic pressure and lowers water activity to prevent spoilage (18). Sucrose is a fermentation substrate for lactic acid in cultured buttermilk (40) and lowers the freezing point of ice cream and other frozen desserts to improve product mouthfeel and texture. 

There is a need for interaction and assessment of different activities or processes to overcome any shortcomings by improving or readjusting the system of working, operation or controls, to achieve a better work culture and an understanding and respect for all in the system. When followed, this will result in the following ... 

So far we have shown how, by manipulating the formulation of media, improvements in product yield and product diversification were achieved in the early years of penicillin production. We have deliberately selected the high points of these development activities. We will now turn our attention to another aspect of the development of penicillin production the switch from surface to deep culture. 

---