Performance issues, prioritization

With 500 new products introduced each year, 3M has a continuous flow of opportunities for improving its environmental, health and safety performance. To make the most of these opportunities, 3M requires that all new products undergo LCM review prior to commercialization. Business units also conduct LCM reviews for existing products on a prioritized basis. In these reviews, product development teams address the environmental, health and safety opportunities, and issues present at each stage of a product s life - from development and manufacturing, through distribution and customer use, to disposal. 

One of the main advantages of using performance measures is that they enable companies to express the results of a safety process in quantitative, not qualitative, terms that can then be analyzed to determine efficiency of safety and health processes (Leandri 2001,39). These measurements permit identification and prioritization. They also identify the most rewarding efforts and allow prioritization of company-wide issues. 

Additionally, the hospital call center also suffered from the staff-arrangement issues due to performing multiple tasks, e.g., returning calls, and administrative work (Moore et al. 2001). The operators competencies rely on experiences and intuition to prioritize when and which task has to be performed. The lack of these competencies results in customer s long waiting time and increased abandonment rate. 

Auditable Testing, classification, and prioritization of alarm and performance measurements are major issues related to this point. Each alarm is checked against its becoming stale, standing shelved, etc. needs to be considered. 

Prioritizing maintenance activities is central to a methodical, structured maintenance approach, in contrast to merely addressing maintenance issues in a reactive, short-term mode. From the preceding sections, it should be apparent that life-cycle asset management can be used to develop a prioritization scheme that may then be employed in a wider set of funding decisions, not only maintenance "go/no-go" decisions. This entails the methodical evaluation of each maintenance action against preestablished values and attributes such as the key performance indicators described in Chap. 12. 

A generic radiation safety assessment should cover issues of safety and interactions with security that may arise during each stage of the lifetime of the source, including distribution, installation, commissioning, use, maintenance and disposal. The review should identify the potential for accidents to cause serious injury or radioactive contamination, and the probability of such accidents occurring and their consequences. Past performance in compliance and information on any past accidents should be reviewed as part of the prioritization process. 

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