Safe and Sound

Early in November, the Dallas Armacell plant achieved the Safety and Health Achievement Recognition Program award for safety in the workplace. The award was given to them by the Occupational Safety & Health Administration.

Three months down the road, the plant's manager, Mike Heintzelman, spoke with Dallas-Hiram Patch about what the plant is doing to maintain its high safety standards and to advance its safety procedures even further.

"We've been working really hard over the years to improve our safety programs," he says.

Heintzelman says that all of this is a voluntary effort in partnership with OSHA to make the workplace as safe as feasibly possible.

"We would have different risk managers come out, look at our plant [and] identify areas that needed improvement." Heintzelman said. "You're basically saying [to OSHA], 'I want to be a safe organization, we don't have any secrets; come in here, and anything that you find, we're willing to correct.'"

Heintzelman says that safety is priority one at the Dallas Armacell plant, but it's also priority one for him on a personal level.

"I don't want anybody going home hurt," he said. "We talk to our employees every day [about safety], and during the crew meetings we talk about 'Hey, we want you to go home with everything you brought here.'"

According to Heintzelman, the plant follows the "Five S" production system that was first adopted by Toyota. The five S's are Sort, Separate, Shine, Standardize and Sustain. He says that they follow a sixth S that comes before all others—that one being Safety. According to him, following the first five makes for the sixth.

He says that the plant believes in "housekeeping," meaning that a large emphasis is placed on organization and cleaning in the plant. In other words, Sort, Separate and Shine of the five S's.

A subsequent tour of the plant gave more insight into some of the new safety procedures that Heintzelman has overseen over the past few months.

Among these new features are the steel columns that support the plant. Each one has been painted a specific color to indicate the locations of certain objects. Red columns indicate a fire extinguisher, for example, and green indicates an eye wash station.

This part, Heintzelman says, meets the Standardize portion of the Five S system.

"Before, we just had a little sticker there that said 'fire extinguisher,' so you would actually have to hunt and look for that label," he said loudly over the roar of the machines. "But now, almost instantly...we can instantly tell where those fire extinguishers are anywhere in the plant."

He also says that the plant is looking at the possibility of redrawing the plant's forklift pathways with a durable yellow tape rather than paint, which has chipped significantly. They've also added several guards to their machines in order to eliminate the possibility of fingers getting caught.

Heintzelman is confident that the Dallas plant is moving in the right direction to keep its high standard of safety and to move toward an even safer environment.

"We want to take (safety) to the next level," he said, adding that he would like to see more emphasis on the housekeeping aspect of the safety procedures in the future.

He does admit, though, that the most challenging part of all of this effort is sustaining the fifth S.

"After you have these types of efforts," he says, "you have to sustain them."