Maintaining worker safety within a manufacturing plant requires the cooperation and participation of all plant employees. But Toray Plastics (America) Inc. of North Kingstown has raised that approach to an art form.
Programs to improve worker safety, which the employees themselves recommend and test out, as well as daily shift-start meetings that focus on safety briefings, have been the key to setting industry standards for minimizing Occupational Safety and Health Administration-related incidents.
Toray statistics show that since 2008 – because of these programs – the company has achieved a 50 percent drop in days out of work for plant employees, and its manufacturing departments have gone 1,007 days injury free. Its shipping and receiving department has logged more than 5,510 days free of OSHA incidents, and its maintenance dept. is one of several divisions that have gone 3,700 days without a single OSHA incident.
“We work every day with our employees to set safety as our No. 1 priority,” said Lisa Ahart, vice president of human resources.
Safety Manager Don Rhodes is proud of the level of involvement he sees from plant employees leading to this honor. Examples include the STOP program participation, and levels of CPR certifications among employees, he said.
“This is not a top-down management system,” Ahart said. “It’s a down-up, sideways, every-which-way system that’s all inclusive.”
This factor is part of what officials feel is a positive and open culture, wherein transparency and accessibility are essential to having a successful company. Examples include Toray’s “From the Floor” program, in which employees from all levels in the organization submit their ideas and suggestions to better the company, the facility, and/or common practices. Annually, each division holds a general manager’s meeting for employees from every department to attend, during which senior management presents recent financial results and details the different applications and areas in which the sales department is looking to expand. There are also monthly business-advancement meetings, at which each department head meets with senior managers to detail financial activity and progress made on projects that department teams worked on during the prior month.
Ahart said Toray’s safety performance numbers are remarkable given the kind of work that’s done in the company’s manufacturing plants. “They’re working with equipment at a high level of heat generation, a high weight level, a high rate of speed. There’s a lot to making sure all the work is done safely.”
Toray produces 190 million pounds of plastic film annually for use in flexible and rigid packaging, lids, and graphic, industrial, optical and electronic applications. The company boasts it is the only U.S. manufacturer of precision-performance polyester, polypropylene, metalized and bio-based films and is a leading global supplier to the automotive and flooring industries.
Rhodes said the company conducts semi-annual safety competitions in which small groups of employees join forces on safety and environmental improvement projects, all focused on making the workplace safer.
He said some of these ideas have ended up being implemented. For example, a maintenance work group replaced pumps inside a confined space with an extended version that could be serviced from outside of the space, avoiding the need for entry. A production group redesigned a tool’s handle to provide greater control and to distance hands from hot material. Another production group recognized that there were height variations in some of the carts used to move rolls and changed their work procedures to check for the height and to use specific carts.
“Together, they are helping to make sure there’s no serious injury,” Ahart said of the employee groups.
Toray’s application for recognition in the Manufacturing Awards program also highlights the company’s monthly, mandatory, in-depth reviews into specific work and industry safety topics. These reviews include global harmonization standard reporting, incident reporting, hearing conservation/personal protective equipment reporting and powered industrial trucks, electrical safety reporting. Each year, Toray employees sign a safety-commitment poster affirming the corporate and individual commitment to safety. •
