No Greater Waste
Posted on Tue, Apr 27, 2010
In the current Operational Excellence Insight, we explore the relationship between safety and Lean Six Sigma.
Operational Excellence advocates often cite the old expression "What gets measured gets improved". Using that logic, do your Operational Excellence metrics include safety performance? After all, there is no greater form of waste than allowing a person to be injured.
Decades ago I worked at a plant that experienced an industrial accident when a welder tried to fix a defect on a pressure vessel filled with a reactive gas mixture. The weld repair procedure was completely safe and well understood: release the pressure, purge the vessel, burnish the defect and apply a new weld. Similar repairs were done routinely.
But this time a small, non-technical complication was introduced. Specifically, the defect was discovered at the end of first shift. Employees on the first shift naturally assumed the person making the repair would purge the vessel before starting work. The second shift welder naturally assumed the vessel had already been depressurized and purged when he began the repair.
The combination of these two natural assumptions was fatal.
Read the full article. We invite you to add your experiences to the comment section.