Safety is a key concern for any industrial engineer, whether you work in manufacturing, logistics, or service operations. You want to prevent accidents, injuries, and errors that can harm your workers, customers, and reputation. But how can you identify and eliminate the root causes of safety hazards in your process? One tool that can help you is value stream mapping (VSM).
VSM is a method of visualizing and analyzing the flow of materials, information, and activities in a process. It helps you see how value is created and delivered to the customer, as well as where waste, inefficiencies, and delays occur. By mapping the current state of your process, you can identify the sources of variation, complexity, and risk that affect safety. You can also design a future state that eliminates or minimizes these factors and improves safety performance.
In order to create a VSM, you need to select a process or product family that has a significant impact on safety, customer satisfaction, and business goals. Define the scope and boundaries of the process by determining the start and end points, the inputs and outputs, and the main steps and sub-steps involved. Collect data on the process such as cycle time, lead time, inventory, defects, and other relevant metrics for each step. Additionally, observe the work environment, layout, equipment, and human factors that affect safety. Draw the current state map using standard symbols and notation to represent the process steps, flows, inventory, information, and customers. Analyze the current state map for waste, variation, complexity, and risk in the process. Identify the root causes of safety hazards and their impact on quality, cost, and delivery. Then draw the future state map envisioning how the process can be improved to eliminate or reduce safety hazards and waste. Apply lean principles and best practices to simplify, standardize, and streamline the process. Develop an action plan to prioritize and schedule improvement actions that will help you achieve the future state. Assign roles and responsibilities, resources, and milestones. Monitor progress and track results.
VSM can improve safety by reducing or eliminating waste, variation, complexity, and risk. Waste is any activity or resource that does not add value to the customer or the process and can create safety hazards by increasing complexity, clutter, handling, movement, and errors. Variation is any deviation or change in the process that affects the quality, consistency, and predictability of the output and can create safety hazards by increasing uncertainty, stress, rework, and adjustments. Complexity is any factor that makes the process more difficult, confusing, or challenging to perform or manage and can create safety hazards by increasing cognitive load, communication gaps, and decision errors. Risk is any potential or actual event that can cause harm, damage, or loss to the process, workers, customers, or stakeholders and can create safety hazards by increasing exposure, severity, and frequency of accidents and incidents. By applying VSM you can simplify and standardize your process while streamlining it to reduce waste, variation, complexity and risk while enhancing value quality and efficiency.
VSM can help you achieve several benefits for safety, such as improving safety culture by involving workers, customers, and stakeholders in the process, which can foster awareness and engagement. It can also enhance safety performance by eliminating or reducing safety hazards and waste, resulting in improved safety metrics and reduced costs. Additionally, VSM can lead to increased customer satisfaction by delivering safer and higher quality products and services, thereby boosting customer loyalty and enhancing your reputation.
VSM is not a one-time event, but a continuous improvement process. To ensure its sustainability for safety, you need to review and update your VSM regularly, monitor and measure the results of your improvement actions, and identify any gaps or new opportunities for improvement. Additionally, it's important to document and communicate your VSM and improvement actions to your workers, customers, and stakeholders. Training, coaching, and support should be provided to ensure they understand and follow the VSM. Rules, policies, and procedures should also be established and enforced to maintain the VSM. Finally, it's essential to recognize the efforts of your workers, customers, and stakeholders in the VSM process by celebrating successes and learnings from your VSM. Incentivize the best practices and behaviors that support the VSM.
Process & Capabilities Manager at Hewlett Packard
One of the key aspects in the data box is to put all data available with us including Safety .Many people are not realising safety is also a data point which needs to be there in the data box .When we go for consolidating the Kaizen bursts the first priority is to address the safety related risks .VSM is a wonderful tool which streamlines the entire E2E process.