Lean approach safety improvements

This visit confirmed the importance of building a disciplined workforce. So, use 5S with a focus on safety improvement to build safety discipline. Look at 5S wearing your safety glasses and you will see this lean approach in a new light. It is a great foundation for world-class safety and world-class lean, or lean safety. 

While worker safety is often touted as a company s first priority, more often than not. safety activity is driven by compliance to legislation rather than any safety improvement initiative. Lean takes a proactive approach — it is not contingent on legislation. A serious Lean effort will tear apart an old inefficient entitlement-riddled culture and build it into something effective. 

Lean is a systematic approach that focuses the entire enterprise on continuously improving quaUty, cost, dehvery, and safety by seeking to eliminate waste, create flow, and increase the velocity of the system s ability to meet customer demand. 

Safety professionals, team leaders, and concerned workers today scramble to find the "best" safety approach for their workplace. Typically, whatever offers the cheapest "quick fix" sells. TTiis is not surprising, given the "lean and mean" atmosphere of the Hmes. Programs that offer the most benefit with least effort sound best, but will they really work to improve safety over the long term ... 

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