Safety and ergonomics strategy at Heatcraft: Do it safely, or not at all

A positioning table used at Heatcraft’s Stone Mountain, Ga., facility presents the work so that employees can comfortably install wiring in the product. Photo courtesy of Heatcraft.

Earlier this year business leaders from the Georgia Manufacturing Alliance visited Heatcraft Worldwide Refrigeration in Stone Mountain, Ga., and besides eye and ear protection they were asked to put on cut-resistant sleeves. This is Georgia, which has a very brief season that calls for long sleeves. They obliged and slipped on the sleeves to cover their forearms.

Why must visitors and workers alike wear them? You can bet a formal risk assessment was behind it. A division of Lennox International, Heatcraft produces refrigeration technology for a range of temperature-critical applications, from units that control the temperatures of produce and frozen food in walk-in coolers and freezers in restaurants, convenience stores, and grocery stores, to equipment used to precision-cool data centers and other industrial applications.

Lennox, a $3.5 billion enterprise, has plants all over the world. Lennox’s refrigeration segment, which includes Heatcraft, had net sales of $713 million in 2015. Among other manufacturing facilities, the Heatcraft division has a custom fabrication, assembly, and product testing operation in Stone Mountain, Ga., just east of Atlanta, where employees produce lower-volume, configured-to-order product. It also has a 600,000-sq.-ft. plant in Tifton, Ga., that handles fabrication and assembly for its higher-volume product lines.

All of these products have sheet metal enclosures, and in the Stone Mountain facility, the cut blanks from the turret punch press and small stamping presses can have sharp edges. What are the chances of operators and visitors who don’t go near the equipment actually getting cut by a piece of sharp sheet metal? Very small—but the risk assessment takes an objective approach that starts with one assumption that, according to sources, drives everything across Heatcraft and its global parent company.

“If it’s not safe, we’re just not going to do it.”

So said Larry Golen, vice president and general manager, Heatcraft Refrigeration Products North America. On his office door at the Stone Mountain facility, above his name is a far more important distinction: “Grandpa.” He recently became one for the first time.

Trumpeting grandfatherhood isn’t unusual, but put in the context of the company’s safety program, it bears special significance. What if any loved one—a grandchild, a child, a spouse—were injured on the job? How would that person feel if, say, the injury had been prevented if the company could have made an investment of some sort, and yet didn’t because it didn’t make “business sense” to do so?

Shaping the Safety Culture

According to Golen and other managers, the safety culture began to shift after Todd Bluedorn, previously a senior executive at United Technologies, took the helm as Lennox’s CEO in 2007. Before then sources said that Lennox didn’t have a terrible safety record; in 2008 the Heatcraft division had 13 recordable injuries, none severe. “Still, at that point, Todd Bluedorn came in and said that this was not acceptable,” Golen said.

What Bluedorn wanted was for the safety aspect of operations to be baked into the company processes, and thought of first, not last. At the time, if the organization implemented new safety practices or procedures, be it a light curtain on a press brake or a new procedure for lifting a workpiece, it was too often reactive rather than preventive. When someone experienced a lost-time incident, safety personnel analyzed the problem, then installed equipment safeguards or procedures to fix it.

So in 2008 the safety team began doing risk assessments on equipment. “Our first phase was to assess all of our machines and prioritize our efforts,” said Rob LaRosa, director of corporate safety at Lennox International, based near Dallas. “The second phase involved doing risk assessments on those priorities, including our tube benders and press brakes.”

Fork trucks at Heatcraft’s Stone Mountain, Ga., facility navigate wide aisles and have specialized lights to alert nearby employees and visitors. Photo courtesy of Heatcraft.

This involved a detailed approach that entailed not just an assessment of safeguarding, but whether the safeguarding was adequate for the job at hand. For instance, if a press brake had a light curtain, was that light curtain the correct distance away from the pinch point? Did the operator need to mute that curtain to form small workpieces? If so, was an alternative safeguard necessary?

Soon workers began to notice changes. Press brake operators noticed additional hard guards being installed behind the machine. If a brake, punch press, or other equipment could be operated safer with a light curtain, close-proximity laser-based system, or alternative safeguard, it got one.

“And yes, I admit, when we made changes, like installed light curtains, people would gripe.” That was Jim Hogan, director of product engineering and manufacturing at the Stone Mountain plant. Hogan recalled how managers started to focus on proper tool change procedures for certain punch presses that would improve worker safety and ergonomics. Operators and department supervisors claimed it would hurt efficiency, but in the end, after a few time studies, they found that the safer procedure was in fact more efficient, not less.

Still, as sources explained, efficiency isn’t really the point. Safety is considered a moral imperative. “If it helps makes us more efficient,” Golen said, “that’s just a bonus.”

Chris Styles, environment, health, and safety (EHS) manager at the Tifton plant, chimed in: “I’ve never had a capital expenditure [request] denied for a safety-related item.” Styles added that this really makes the company’s safety initiatives meaningful. Trumpeting the fact that safety is a priority is one thing; but without devoting the resources (that is, money), all that safety cheerleading doesn’t carry much weight.

Of course, Lennox needs to show a profit and answer to shareholders, so how can every safety capital expense request be approved? As sources explained, it’s because safety is baked into the planning at the very start. The safety expense is looked at as a kind of baseline investment threshold, essentially a fundamental cost of doing business. If that threshold can’t be met, the project isn’t pursued in the first place. Put another way, safety and ergonomics investments aren’t analyzed for their return; they’re just regarded as a necessity, a little like keeping the lights on.

Of course, keeping the lights on is pretty straightforward. Sure, you can analyze energy efficiency, but regardless of how much power the lights draw, they’re either on or off. As sources explained, it’s impossible to eliminate the risk of injury entirely. So where do you draw the line for that threshold, the point at which the risk of injury is low enough to move a project forward?

Determining this was LaRosa’s mission. In 2008 he and his team began tackling areas with high injury frequency as well as areas with high injury severity. He focused not only on safety but ergonomics, too, especially the impact of work on the back and shoulders.

“We also implemented a factory audit process around 2008,” he said. “Each of our factories are audited once a year by a team of cross-business-unit safety professionals. We’re focusing our efforts on sharing information and learning from each other.”

From this began the corporation’s safety initiative that focused on two broad areas: equipment and employee engagement.

Heatcraft Worldwide Refrigeration produces the commerical refrigeration units that control the temperature in various settings, including the produce aisle at the grocery store. This Heatcraft showroom in Stone Mountain showcases the refrigeration as well as the actual food cases produced by different Lennox divisions under various brand names. All the food, though impressively real-looking, is fake.

Equipment Safeguarding

Safety personnel focused on two areas: stationary machines (like presses and tube benders) and material handling equipment, like tables, carts, tuggers, forklifts, and other powered industrial trucks (PIT).

They performed risk assessments, observed how workers interacted with machines, identified the level of risk each operation presented, then first worked to “engineer out” the problem to minimize risk. They replaced tables with scissor lift tables, so employees could access work at a comfortable height. They installed regulators on fork trucks that prevent them from going too fast. Factories now have dedicated PIT lanes designed always to be clear of any pedestrian traffic. And the company is looking for ways to minimize PIT use by moving machines and workcells closer together and reducing batch sizes so work can be transported efficiently via carts or other means.

According to sources, safeguarding investments sometimes go beyond industry standards. For instance, the Stone Mountain facility—which focuses on low-volume, custom work—has several ergonomics devices that, considering the shop’s low-volume, high-mix atmosphere, might not make “business sense” in the conventional sense.

Some equipment has sheet lifters that aid large-workpiece handling. As Hogan put it, “We fabricate components as small as a toaster oven and as large as a semitrailer,” and that mix changes dramatically day to day and week to week.

Regardless, the company made the sheet lifter investment in the custom fab shop, even though at times those lifters may be used only several hours a week. And yes, these devices do make work procedures ergonomic—no more heavy lifting, no more back strain—and therefore more efficient, but under conventional thinking, such gains certainly don’t provide an acceptable return on investment (ROI) in this low-volume environment. But again, safety is not about the ROI, so the argument is pretty much moot.

In the company’s higher-volume production plant in Tifton, Ga., tube benders not only have conventional hard guarding around them, but also laser scanners that, if tripped with an unanticipated obstruction, will stop the machine. The company considers the hard guarding a baseline safety measure that, when locked, makes it impossible for an operator to be in the way of a tube being formed. But because of where the machine is positioned on the floor, there is a very small chance those walking by could get hurt if they step outside the defined walkways.

This again goes beyond conventional safeguarding as a result of the company’s risk assessment. The proper safeguarding, sources said, needs to be matched not only with the machine, but also with the potential behavior of any person near that machine; this includes operators, other employees, and visitors.

Safety in a Custom Environment

This past summer workers in the custom fabrication shop in Stone Mountain found themselves being filmed. The company brought in a few college students (some happened to be the sons and daughters of employees) to film workers performing their daily tasks. After filming, company safety professionals reviewed the tape and identified common patterns, pointed out safety and ergonomic issues, and recommended changes. From this came, among other things, those scissor lift tables that now populate the shop.

Process improvement is often more straightforward in the high-volume, low-product-mix arena, and the same could be said of improving safety and ergonomics. If cross-trained workers perform all sorts of different work, and the product mix changes dramatically from one day to the next, identifying patterns can be a challenge.

But just like job shops can identify product families—different products but with similar attributes—observers at Heatcraft’s custom fab shop could identify work patterns that presented safety and ergonomic issues. People may be assembling different products, but they all must access the work in front of them, hence the need for scissor lift tables. Assemblers put together various wiring configurations inside sheet metal enclosures of different heights and widths. But during every wiring job, observers noted that all such workers had to lean over for long periods, straining their backs. So the shop fabricated a few simple custom wiring fixtures that the assemblers can tilt to suit, making their jobs easier.

Engagement

As LaRosa explained, these solutions wouldn’t have become obvious without changes to employee behavior through observation, one-on-one meetings, and employee feedback.

LaRosa’s team is following the fundamentals of behavioral-based safety, in which safety personnel ask front-line personnel a list of questions that cover personal protective equipment, lifting and movement, as well as how safety fits into the standard work instructions. Employees then provided feedback as well as ideas of their own.

The first phase of this engagement process was directed by safety personnel at the plant and corporate level. The second phase involved plant management and area supervisors. At this writing, the organization is now working on the final phase: peer-to-peer observation.

To make such engagement work, sources said that two elements need to be in place. First, they need the right incentives. The company does celebrate successes. For instance, in 2015 Heatcraft had no recordable injuries, and the company celebrated with a company picnic and prizes. That said, individuals aren’t rewarded for being accident-free. After all, the last thing the company wants is for people not to report an injury or unsafe behavior just so they can meet a zero-injury goal.

Instead, the company does activity-based recognition. If employees always perform daily safety checks on a machine, and perhaps even come up with ideas to improve the safety of an operation, those individuals are recognized and rewarded.

“We’ve found we get more out of [activity-based recognition] in terms of changing behavior,” LaRosa said. “And this helps reduce risk at the same time.”

He added that productivity benchmarks are made with safe work behavior in mind. The last thing the company wants is for workers to be incentivized to mute a light curtain just to meet a parts-per-hour goal.

When there is a breach in safety procedures, managers immediately coach the employee and, if appropriate, take disciplinary steps to address the behavior to prevent reoccurrence. “It’s about how we all react to the injury,” said Pete Kichula, vice president of operations, Heatcraft Worldwide Refrigeration. “We need to ask, ‘How can we learn from this, get better, and make the factory safer?’”

Safety is now covered during all meetings, be they on the shop floor or in the front office. Someone running into a filing cabinet and falling down can be just as serious (if not more so) as someone cutting their finger on a sharp edge of sheet metal.

“Safety is no longer something talked about just once a year,” said Luke Wuthrich, director of Heatcraft’s Tifton operations. “Safety is integrated into any process we do. If we, say, look at a change that will improve our quality and delivery and reduce our costs, but the safety bar isn’t cleared, that cancels out all those other gains.”

Wuthrich added that the safety evaluation is also baked into capital spending decisions, including those for machines, conveyors, and other material handling systems. “Our signoff form for our capital expenditures includes a safety evaluation before pulling the trigger for a purchase.”

With this culture as a backdrop, the company now is working on the final phase of employee engagement, where peer observes peer. Sources added that this is happening in many places throughout the organization, but not everywhere yet.

“It can take a while to get to that level of performance,” LaRosa said, “but that would be our long-term goal.”

Sources added baking in safety and ergonomics into company practices is even more important now. At this writing, Heatcraft is growing faster than expected. Both the Stone Mountain and Tifton plants have dozens of temporary employees to handle the excess work. The company starts most of its employees on a temporary basis before they come onboard permanently, to ensure both the employee and the company agree it is a good fit.

It’s easy for temporary employees, unfamiliar with the plant and its equipment, to be put at a greater risk of injury. But as sources explained, with all employees, temporary and permanent, looking out for one another, and safety mentioned at virtually every meeting—from the boardroom to the morning group huddle on the shop floor—that risk is minimized, and most can expect to go home to their families injury-free. In the end, going home, free of pain and injury, is what it’s all about.

Heatcraft Worldwide Refrigeration, 770-465-5600, www.heatcraftrpd.com