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Working toward zero recordables in the metal fabrication shop

A conversation with an FMA Safety Award winner provides a glimpse at how a large manufacturing organization minimizes injury risk

BTD Manufacturing provides PPE to its employees.

As part of its commitment to safety, BTD Manufacturing purchases personal protective equipment for its employees. Phynart Studio/Getty images

A lot can go wrong on the shop floor of a metal fabricating company. Debris in eyes and lacerations represent just the tip of the iceberg, but even those small events can result in lost time from work. Keeping employees safe on a daily basis is a real accomplishment.

That’s one of the reasons that BTD Manufacturing, which has four locations (Detroit Lakes, Minn.; Lakeville, Minn.; Washington, Ill.; and Dawsonville, Ga.), routinely applies for—and wins—FMA Safety Awards. These awards, presented to Fabricators & Manufacturers Association members who apply and qualify, are celebrated by the company because both management and employees recognize the commitment it takes to avoid injuries doing a job filled with risk.

What makes for an FMA Safety Award winner? The Safety Award of Merit, which all BTD Manufacturing locations qualified for in 2020, was presented to companies posting an injury and illness incidence rate for 2019 that is better than the published Bureau of Labor Statistics rate by 10% or greater, based on the company’s North American Industry Classification System code. In 2019 BTD Manufacturing had 16 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recordable injuries and three cases of days away from work. Just under 1,300 employees worked approximately 2.4 million hours in 2019, and those were the only injuries that BTD Manufacturing reported.

BTD Manufacturing’s Heywood Avenue location in Lakeville, a tooling facility, won the 2020 Safety Award of Honor, which is presented to companies having a perfect safety record. That’s no OSHA recordable injuries or illnesses in 2019. With that performance, it also garnered FMA’s 2020 Most Improved Safety Record.

To learn more about how a large manufacturing organization is able to minimize injuries in its facilities, The FABRICATOR talked with Chief Operating Officer Robert Bradford and Director of Tooling and Organizational Development Jeff King.

The FABRICATOR: Where does safety fit into BTD Manufacturing’s core values?

Robert Bradford: From an operational standpoint, we focus on safety, quality, delivery, productivity, and people. That’s what I preach to all the sites. So for us, safety is the cornerstone. It’s one of our core values. It’s part of everything that we do.

Every Tuesday we have a new-hire meeting where some of the executives and other leaders in the company meet with the new hires. Of course, we’re doing that virtually now. But when we get together, one of the things that we talk about is reiterating the fact that we want everyone to be safe. Always be looking out for unsafe conditions. If you don’t feel safe, don’t do it. If you don’t know what to do, ask questions. Safety is definitely one of the things we talk about all the time.

FAB: What type of communication structure exists to share safety issues with all members of the BTD Manufacturing team?

Bradford: We have quarterly meetings with the company’s leaders. We used to do them in person, but we have been doing video-conferencing over the past year. That’s where we talk about the core values, such as safety, and set annual goals for each of those areas. Those goals then are shared with everyone in the company.

Every Monday a discussion occurs with the safety professionals from all over the company. This is where an OSHA recordable or a DART [days away, restricted and transfer injury] is talked about and shared with the other facilities. That discussion might then work its way down to the 10 a.m. meeting at every site when leaders talk about safety, quality, delivery, and productivity. It also might be discussed in the daily huddles that begin before each shift.

We have a corporate goal every year in terms of overall safety measures, such as OSHA recordables, but we’re also looking at things like near-misses and reported unsafe acts. We want to have goals set for different departments in different facilities. A facility that didn’t have a recordable the year before might be working on different things than a site that had two or three recordables the year before.

FAB: Does each site have a dedicated safety professional?

Bradford: Each facility has someone called a safety coordinator. There’s one in every facility. I meet with those people weekly to talk about safety.

In two of our facilities, the safety coordinator is a full-time position. In the other two facilities, that person also has learning and development duties. Those two facilities are smaller. Also, those safety coordinators lead a safety committee in their facility. The safety committee is made up of people from different functional areas.

FAB: How do you get to the point where you are able to rely on good planning instead of good fortune to minimize the risk of injury to employees?

Bradford: There’s always some good fortune, no matter what you do. There’s also going to be something that happens, and there’s nothing that you can do about it.

What you can do is start looking for and identifying patterns of unsafe behavior. Then you can put into place corrective actions to prevent that. The focus on trying to eliminate the unsafe act or condition might prevent an injury from happening.

When those unsafe situations are identified, we have a process that looks to solve the problem that could lead to a recordable injury. It might be something simple, such as removing a pallet from the aisle, but it’ll force further discussion. Why do we think that’s the way to do it? What do we really want to get done here?

Jeff King: When unsafe incidents happen in any location, they are reported and shared with company leadership. That fosters the sharing of information throughout the company. So, if something happens in Detroit Lakes, that is shared across the board—to all the sites. Then people can pick up on that, look at it, and consider whether the same thing could happen in their own facility. Maybe they want to make sure that’s shared in the daily huddle.

We use an app called Vector EHS, and it does a good job of notifying everyone in company leadership. All incidents, no matter whether it’s recordable or not, goes into it. It documents the unsafe conditions.

FAB: What makes employees feel OK about reporting an unsafe act, which in some other manufacturing facilities might be construed as telling on another employee?

Bradford: Whenever I think about why people want to participate, I think about culture. I also think about this quote: “It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting.” It’s really about behaviors, and culture is really the culmination of behaviors that you are doing.

It’s the mundane things over and over every day. We have the 10 a.m. meeting every day. We ask about unsafe acts and unsafe conditions every day. We ask if there was an OSHA recordable every day. We’re putting tools out there and establishing a cadence that lets everyone know that safety is a major value and a safe work environment is expected.

John Abbott, senior vice president, Otter Tail Corp. [parent company of BTD Manufacturing], once said, “Bad news is good news.” The point he was making is that you can’t do something if you don’t know there’s a problem. So we tell people that it’s OK to bring something up because we can deal with it. If you don’t say anything, then it’s really hard to make anything better.

I once knew a Japanese lean consultant who used to say that in the absence of standard work, there can be no kaizen. That’s right, and with safety, it’s sort of the same thing. We’ve got to report the unsafe conditions. We need to solve the problem. We’ve got to do it the same way. We’ve got to create the cadence. We’ve got to have people create opportunities where we can make things better.

FAB: How does BTD Manufacturing introduce new hires to its safety culture?

Bradford: That’s obviously a challenge. Like I said, every Tuesday we see these new hires, and they’re getting inundated by people telling them to be safe. What I try to stress is that you have to slow down to go fast. What I mean is that while they are getting fed with a firehose of information, they need to make sure they take their time and they are safe.

Remember, it’s safety, quality, delivery, and productivity. It’s in that order.

A lot of things can get you in trouble. It doesn’t matter if you are a brand-new employee or a guy who’s been here for 30 years. If you are not paying attention, something can happen. It only takes a few seconds.

Also, we make sure we provide new hires with whatever tools we think they might need. Obviously, we provide all the PPE for everybody.

FAB: What’s are BTD Manufacturing’s main key performance indicators as you they track safety in your facilities?

Bradford: Our KPIs are familiar ones for manufacturers. We watch OSHA recordables and DART.

King: It’s all about people going home the same way they came in that day.

FAB: What do you do to maintain a consistent focus on safety so employees don’t tune out the effort?

King: At our facility, we celebrate routinely. We do a lot of cookouts. This is just part of our culture when it comes to safety. One thing that COVID made challenging is rewarding people without the ability to have people really enjoy what they were used to. With the pandemic ending, they are really going to get their bang for the buck with the free burgers.

But in reality it’s not about the reward. It’s the recognition. It’s about being thanked.

We also have the good fortune of having a very seasoned staff. They take safety seriously. They watch out for the new people. For example, we’ve got these grinding wheels, and it’s very easy to just touch your knuckle on them and scrape them up really quick. When a new person comes in, the veterans explain right away what to do to avoid injury. That’s the type of team approach that you get in this facility that helps to keep people safe.

Bradford: It really is the people on the floor who make this work. It’s not me. It’s not Jeff.

We send out this quarterly newsletter, and one of the things I included in it was that last year, even with the crazy economy, shutdowns, and furloughs, we actually got better with our safety performance year over year. It’s because of our employees. They’re the ones that think safety is important.

About the Author
The Fabricator

Dan Davis

Editor-in-Chief

2135 Point Blvd.

Elgin, IL 60123

815-227-8281

Dan Davis is editor-in-chief of The Fabricator, the industry's most widely circulated metal fabricating magazine, and its sister publications, The Tube & Pipe Journal and The Welder. He has been with the publications since April 2002.