Application of Continuous Improvement Principals and Methods to Safety, 1996 Nonwovens Conference Proceedings

Eugene H. Burrows
Tamko Roofing Products, Inc.

Continuous improvement principles and methodology should be aggressively adapted to the field of safety. They have been broadly applied to manufacturing processes throughout U.S. industry for years. The resulting gains in process knowledge have led the way to a multitude of remarkable quality and productivity improvements. Similar opportunities exist in safety. For these benefits to be realized, however, “Total Quality Management” must indeed become “Total” with respect to the full range of management issues, including safety. There were many widely held but erroneous beliefs regarding quality in the past. These opinions created sizable obstacles to the acceptance of the ideas of Shewhart, Deming, Juran and others. Similar barriers persist today when these concepts come up against the long-standing, and very similar, opinions concerning safety. A comparison of these paradigms illustrates many parallels between quality and safety improvement. Fortunately, these continuous improvement principles and methods are as applicable, effective, and beneficial with regard to safety as they are to quality. The lessons learned grappling with quality issues will help avoid reinventing the wheel for safety improvement. In some respects, their application to safety meets with broader acceptance among employees than when quality is the objective. Although the prevalent techniques applied to safety issues today are reminiscent of quality procedures of one or two decades ago, there are notable exceptions. The science, tools and methods employed by these safety practitioners warrant investigation, learning, and adaptation.