Safety First

Every morning Steve Favell walks briskly round the plant preparing his report on site safety for the Focus Factory meeting. In 10 minutes he achieves something that was more difficult before Daily Layered Accountability.

I see as many Level One and Two DLA boards as I can. [The boards cover Safety, Quality, Delivery, Inventory, Productivity/Cost.] Every board’s format is the same, so I can take it in at a glance. If I see red, I stop to find out more. If it’s all green, I move on. If the board hasn’t been filled in yet, I’ll pause to find out why. Ten or fifteen minutes later I’m reporting my findings at Focus Factory [the Level Three meeting at which value stream leaders, function leaders and the site leadership council review the whole plant’s current performance].

If I see red, I stop to find out more. If it’s all green, I move on. If the board hasn’t been filled in yet, I’ll pause to find out why. Ten or fifteen minutes later I’m reporting my findings at Focus Factory

“This routine is well-embedded now. If I’m not there someone automatically does it in my place. Everyone can see that these things are now being taken very seriously, so they don’t wait for me to do my rounds. Stuff gets put on the board throughout the day. They phone me and say ‘we’ve got a hazard here, this needs doing before there’s an accident’. Or they catch me on one of my regular walks round.

“I can’t think how I would have done the same thing, in such depth, before DLA. There just wasn’t the mechanism to gather the data quickly. Tracking down the right people and explaining what I was trying to do would have taken days. The shopfloor wasn’t so engaged either, so we tended to hear about a thing only after it was already a potential problem. And that might not be for three months, at the quarterly health and safety review.” ■

I can’t think how I would have done the same thing, in such depth, before DLA