Taubitz, now retired, who spent 43 years at General Motors, most of it
working as the company’s top safety standards executive, says that this is
especially important when it comes to safety standards. The alternative can be
dramatically rising operational costs.

For example, he adds, “GM used to spend 10’s of millions of dollars
retrofitting brand new equipment because it didn’t meet designated standards.”
That’s not litigation or compensation in terms of an incident. That’s just
rebuilding something that wasn’t done right in the first place.

Traditionally safety has been a challenge for many companies for a
number of reasons. First, it can be complicated. There are numerous standards
that a manufacturer has to be aware of and they are all in a constant state of
revision to account for new technologies. Then there is the globalization
factor. Each major nation or economic block has its own standards body so a
company with operations in the US, Canada, Europe and South America must keep
track of all of them as it tries to navigate its own, internal operational
standards.

Then there are the corporate cultural challenges. Says Taubitz, “Basic
operations people don’t give two hoots about process, they care about results
and standards are all about process.”

And finally, there are the misconceptions.

Many people assume—not unreasonably—that meeting international safety
standards is costly. After all, any such program is bound to have significant
cost associated with it. However, Paul Gruhn insists the assumption that safety
slows down production and reduces productivity by diverting people from
non-value added activities is patently false.

During the day, Gruhn is Training Manager at SIS vendor ICS Triplex, but
in his spare time, he is a member of the ISA84 Committee that wrote the
standard on safety systems, he’s an ISA Fellow, he developed the world’s
first safety system modeling program ,
he developed and instructs ISA safety courses and he’s the primary author of
the ISA book on the subject.

“There’s this assumption that safety costs money, but it’s not true.
Such statements are a myth that should not be allowed to continue,” he says,
insisting that meeting safety standards has significant benefits that actually
improve production efficiency.

To support this claim he points to the introduction of the Process
Safety Management (PSM) of Highly Hazardous Chemicals (HHCs) standard, 29 CFR
1910.119 regulation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
(OSHA – the top US safety regulatory body) over a dozen years ago. “OSHA has
reported that not only have the number of accidents gone down over 20 percent,
but companies are reporting that their productivity is higher [as a result of
doing PSM].”

Gruhn recommends Nancy
Leveson’s book Safeware, System Safety and Computers which describes a “study conducted by a group that
included the major engineering societies, involved employees of 29 industries
and 60 product groups who had a combined exposure of over 50 billion hours. The
final report confirmed the hypothesis that production increased as safety
increased – a lesson still to be learned by many people today.”

Finally, Gruhn points to the experience of Houston-based ConocoPhillips.
In 1997, Conoco put out an RFP for the construction of a refinery in Venezuela,
including the required safety features. Managers at the winning contractor did
not plan on implementing them, but once forced to comply, found that they’d had
to do such a thorough job planning and organizing things that their
productivity increased dramatically. In fact, they were able to complete the
job at a lower cost than anticipated.

“As long as management believes that safety will cost them money, they
won’t want to do the required tasks. However, once they realize that safety
will save them money and improve their productivity, their attitudes and
actions will change,” Gruhn contends.

Taubitz agrees, but also sees promise in the work being done to
harmonize key practices within the manufacturing industry. In particular he is
happy with the way lean manufacturing is coming together with both safety and
environmental conservation principles.

Upcoming changes to ANSI B11 – a general machine tool safety standard which
is currently undergoing one of those aforementioned revision cycles – includes
references to a technical report, TR7, which offers guidance on integrating
safety and lean manufacturing principles.

Taubitz believes there is “obvious synergy” between lean and safety.

“Lean standardizes work that was previously non-standard. Suffice it to
say that foundation for continuous improvement is creating standardized
working processes. Don’t just think of Safety, think of good design. Moreover,
by building on decades of experience and providing proven methodologies up
front, standards are in fact the enabler for designers to move faster and
cheaper."

“I’m excited to see the toehold with the lean and safe and the bridge to
green. Lean production and the elimination of waste are going to be the make it
or break it factors for US industry.”

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