60%
Injury Reduction
Challenge
One of the world’s largest manufacturing companies was looking to create a breakthrough in its culture and performance in safety and quality. The company’s lost time incident rate and lost work cases were significantly higher when benchmarked against other companies in the industry and compared to companies who had adopted JMJ’s Incident and Injury-Free™ (IIF™) transformational safety approach. In addition, four tragic events had occurred, profoundly impacting the organization.
Solution
The client invested in JMJ’s transformational approach to safety and quality. It began by launching the engagement in the division with the highest number of safety incidents.
Over a four-year period, there was a quantifiable shift in how leaders managed both safety and quality – creating new workforce engagement at all levels. The initial work in one division expanded across the enterprise to engage 40+ operating units and 55,000 employees working in supply chain, engineering, customer support and operations.
Client Goals
Our client committed to reshaping its culture and reinventing the way it thinks about safety and quality. The company also needed to ensure the quality of its end product. Unplanned rework and production line quality issues were creating employee safety risks, contributing to increased injuries and costing an estimated $10 billion annually.
The organization’s desire to increase output and productivity had influenced a culture where leadership prioritized short-term schedule and cost savings over safety and quality, which ultimately led to a decrease in customer satisfaction.
We began an entirely different conversation which included people we had never included before -our workers. This led to the embedding of a culture of safety in the hearts and minds of our employees. It is our people who then transformed the culture and the business.
Results
Focus on safety, leadership, and quality processes significantly improved manufacturing performance and operational excellence. Pairing JMJ’s IIF with lean manufacturing, leadership balanced the needs of the company with the needs of employees, creating workforce engagement and high performance.
Safety is integrated into operational procedures at all levels and is part of the workforce culture. The cultural shift led to the use of different materials, production processes, and a reconfiguration of factories to communicate safety first.
JMJ’s transformational approach dramatically shifted the manufacturing company’s relationship to safety and quality. Their people successfully built a culture of care, concern, and defect-free performance. Safety and quality have become an intrinsic part of a workforce that’s stepping up and leading the way forward.
Key takeaways
- Focusing on safety, leadership and quality processes can significantly improve both manufacturing performance and operational excellence
- When a culture of safety is embedded in your organization, your people will cause transformation
- The needs of a company and the needs of its people can be balanced to create and sustain high performance
- It is possible to break the paradigm that an increase in production leads to an increase in workplace injuries
64% production increase
Shifted culture to focus on quality and safety
60% decrease in serious injury
Created an enterprise-wide focus on safety first
60% reduction in quality defects
Focus on quality saved an estimated 10Bn annually
59% reduction in lost workdays
Safety became intrinsic to the workforce