ONE Ƶ Starts With Safety

The biggest contributor to our success at Ƶ is our people, and our number one job is to send everyone home safe and healthy every day.  Ƶ continuously invests in systems and capital to keep our people safe.

Safety is key to the prevention of injuries and illness through early detection and mitigation of hazards. All the Ƶ safety programs are based on three factors: prevention, detection, and regulatory compliance.

The mantra of “ONE Ƶ” is perfectly exhibited through the implementation of a common safety management system at all Ƶ locations.  Using common policies and practices, Ƶ is a family of successful companies, sharing resources, committed to working safely and exceeding our customers’ expectations.

Safety Front and Center

The Operations Team’s Key Performance Indicators consistently prioritize Safety, encompassing a blend of leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators include JSO Completion Rate, Manager Inspection completion rate and Hazard Report Card completion. The team’s lagging indicators are the DART and TRIR metric measured against the industry standard published by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.  The importance of these metrics is driven throughout each organization through Lean Daily Management.  A Gemba board dedicated to Safety is implemented and maintained on the shop floor in every Strategic Business Unit at Ƶ.  People in all areas and levels of the organization have access to our Safety Metrics and action plans.

Safety Systems

Ƶ is committed to compliance with OSHA standards and regulatory requirements.  There are many processes in place to meet and exceed these standards.  These processes are outlined in policy and procedures and tracked using a comprehensive Safety Dashboard.

As part of a comprehensive Safety Management System containing 21 modules, several programs are in place for early detection and prevention of safety hazards at Ƶ, including:

  • Job Safety Analysis (JSA)
  • Job Safety Observation (JSO)
  • Risk Assessments
  • New Equipment assessments
  • Hazard Report Cards
  • Manager Safety Inspection
  • GEMBA Boards/GEMBA Walks
  • Ergonomic Assessments
  • Machine Guard Assessments

Continuous Improvement

Ƶ’s safety record is strong.  Since launching the Safety Management System improvements, Ƶ has dramatically reduced the number of OSHA Recordable Incidents and equally as important, reduced the severity of the incidents.

Ƶ employs compliant guarding, automation, and vision to mitigate hazards. Guarding prevents unwanted employee machine interaction. Automation and vision software reduces the number of times an employee needs to bend, grip, twist, and reach.In the hierarchy of safety controls, Ƶ strives first to eliminate the hazard through engineering. It is better to have an employee monitor a machine doing the work rather than having the employee doing the work.

The Ƶ Continuous Improvement program includes over 60 trained Lean / Six-Sigma Greenbelts and includes a strong focus on Safety.  All Greenbelt projects and Kaizen events are conducted with Safety at the forefront