Lean champions

Lean champions spend their time engaging and growing people... 

Obviously many people can be engaged in a safety program with the use of subteams. If a company does not want to develop and engage their employees in safety improvement, they can hire a safety director to accomplish all that is noted above. A single lean champion cannot build a lean culture nor can a safety director build world-class safety alone. It will take a team or a committee. The team can be composed of new volunteers and a few staff members who are committed to developing the volunteers. Another option is that the committee can be composed of some current staff members who will tell others they were voluntold by their bosses to be part of the safety committee. Who is going to get your plant to world-class safety ... 

Gemba A lean term that means the shop floor. You will often hear lean champions make a statement like, Let s go to the gemba and get the facts. ... 

OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Admlnlstration)-mandated safety program is compared to a proactive safety program driven by lean thinking and tools. Learn about the value of a proactive program that engages employees in the continuous improvement of safety as seen from the eyes of a manager, a lean champion, and an hourly employee. 

If all of the above listed positions are filled, you will have a large safety committee. The advantage of this is that many safety champions are being developed at one time. That is in alignment with lean thinking—engaging employees in continual improvement activity. Smaller companies may not have the resources to staff a team of that size and may have to ask participants to wear more than one hat. 

Compliance with OSHA regulations will not prevent all potential hazards in a plant. Tracking the OSHA-mandated metrics will not drive safety improvement. Both of these efforts are what companies have to do. This book was written to encourage individuals and the companies where they work to go beyond compliance. Most businesses today are somewhat lean savvy and have someone on board championing these lean efforts. This individual, armed with lean tools, can engage others and then together make a real safety difference. And safety is the no. 1 priority, right ... 

Chart 6.5 also shows how the steering team identifies Lean leaders who will be the champions of the Lean process in their respective areas. These individuals will identify and create Resource Support Teams (RST) that can collect information and access information to support the lean effort. The RST, in conjunction with the steering team, will then identify the team members that are necessary to make each event as effective as possible. 

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