Safety works best when it is more than a priority. It needs to be part of how your plant operates every day. In Episode 19 of the OnAire Podcast, Senior Explosion Safety Consultant Kevin Jeffries shares lessons from 30 years in EH&S, including firsthand experience with facilities impacted by major explosions. He explains why combustible dust safety starts with understanding real-world risk, listening to the people doing the work, and designing processes that make the safe choice the easy choice. The conversation explores safety culture, dust explosion prevention, leadership, and why EH&S should be a partner in production, not just the department called when something goes wrong.
Episode Transcript:
Hey, we’re back in the studio.
Back again.
Episode 19, the mics are hot.
Yeah. It’s crazy that, you know, every time we keep adding up, we always say that, Hey, we’ve done another one. We’re past some milestones. We’ve made it past the normal life of a podcast. We hit on that last time. But, always getting cooler and cooler guests.
That’s true. We’ve got a good one today. We’ll talk about that in just a minute. Just made it through fourth of July, not too long ago.
Happy birthday America.
Yep. Fires and explosions everywhere. It’s funny how we celebrate like that.
Yeah. You know, I guess it is a combustible dust when they shoot the little fireworks up in the sky.
I know. I was telling all my kids like, look at that, combustible dust explosions.
I wonder if they need fans.
Somebody somewhere does. I promise you that. That’s going to be Div 1.
Oh yeah.
Definitely a Div 1 environment. Thank you, UL. Shout out, UL.
Yeah, shout out UL. I wonder how that’s written into the code about like you’re making something that is going to combust.
It’s designed to go boom.
Interesting. I think we need to make some contacts.
That’s right.
If you know somebody that produces fireworks and want to hook them up because they have a dust problem, let us know.
That’s right. We got it. We can take care of it.
We’ll figure it out.
Cleaner, safer, healthier working environment, even if it is designed to blow up at some point. All right. Today’s guest is an awesome one. Kevin Jeffries. I’ve talked to him, worked with him before a couple of times. And so, I’m just excited to have him on the pod.
Yeah. I’ve watched the old interview that you did a while back. And that’s my only interaction with Kevin is a kind of parasocial watching you talk to him. So, how did you guys link up? Who is he? What does he do? And what are we going to learn today?
I don’t even remember how it got started. I think it was a consulting company he was with at the time, a different one. And we had done some work with them on DHAs and stuff like that, educating our team. And we said, Hey, would you guys be interested in doing a podcast? And they were like, Oh, Kevin Jeffries is the guy. Like you need to talk to him. And they weren’t wrong. They were not kidding. He is the guy. It’s kind of the who, not how, and he’s the who. He is passionate about what he does. He’s engaging. He’s got great stories, and just fun to talk to. And every time I see him or get to talk to him on the phone or whatever, we just end up talking for half an hour or more and just enjoy his perspective and his take on safety and work culture.
Yeah. I think that was the cool thing in talking to him. And you all will get to hear it soon, but you know, we spend the bulk of our time here, even though we’re a dust control safety company, we spend like 90% of our time talking about culture. And it was so great to hear somebody in the consulting industry who is supposed to be working on uptime and processes and code stuff say like, This is a people problem. This is a culture issue. This is not like standard one, two, three, four. No, it’s Billy Bob and how he approaches his day. So, I’m super excited.
Yeah, and I think that’s what makes me excited about this place and what we do here. Because I was thinking the other day how much in college I went, I am going to school to become a mechanical engineer, not an airflow engineer. I don’t want to work in HVAC. I don’t want to do anything with fans. And here we are. But it’s not about the fans. It’s about the people. It’s about the people in this building and the people that we serve and protect and try to create those safer work environments all around the world.
Yeah. That’s all it’s about. Because we couldn’t do any of the other stuff if we didn’t do the people well.
Yeah. And the fan’s just a token of that. It’s a what, it’s not a how, it’s not a who, or anything like that. So, all right. Without any further ado, check out Mr. Kevin Jeffries.
Kevin, welcome to the show. It’s good to have you in today.
Thanks, Jordan. It’s good to be here, man.
It’s good to see you again. You and I connected and did one of these things a couple of years ago. And then got to hook up and meet at a show, I think it was a powder and bulk solids show a couple of years ago. And that was fun and good to see you. And you have changed roles since we first met and worked together. And so, tell us about that. What are you doing right now?
Right now I’m with Fike Corporation as a Senior Explosion Safety Consultant doing everything from dust hazard analyses to hazardous area classifications, dig into some other risks related to fire and explosion, but it’s good. I’ve known the folks at Fike for a little over 20 years now. So, it’s good to finally work with folks that I’ve partnered with on other projects and that I admire in this space.
Awesome.
That’s so cool. Look, I’ve told like six people, I’m interviewing somebody who literally has the word explosion in their title. And that’s the coolest thing ever.
It’s the best thing ever. A little shout out to Adam Bats and Brian Edwards for creating a…first off, just from a cultural standpoint, you know, you’ve got a bunch of smart people. And you guys know this cause you’ve got a bunch of smart people in your network. When we all get together, it’s just like, it’s nerdy, it’s techie, but it’s sophisticated. And so yeah, putting those titles together. It was just brilliant.
It sounds like he’s describing this podcast.
I know. Yeah.
Talk nerdy to me. Here we go.
Explosion Specialist. I love it. So, how did you get from Kevin Jeffries to explosion specialists? Like, walk us through that journey. Like, what does a career path like that look like, education and background?
So, it’s wild. I actually majored in occupational safety and health at North Carolina A&T State University.
There we go. Aggie pride.
Right down the road.
And, you know, through the program, there’s a mix of things from fire and explosion to chemical safety. So, you come out with a good kind of degree of knowledge in a lot of areas. And throughout my career to be the best safety professional I could be.
And I will say, you know, I’ve been in this space for 30 years now. Of course, it shows. 22 of those years in industry. So, I worked for some large companies. I worked for Kellogg, worked for Fujifilm and other places. But as an EHS professional, I always made sure that we focused on fire, we focused on risk in addition to the lockout tagouts and machine guarding things of the world. And just through experience and building a network. And I will say this, and again, proud to say that you’re part of the network. I had some experiences where I went to places that had major explosion events. So, I worked for West Pharmaceutical after their explosion and Imperial Sugar after their explosion. And so again, just looking at the broad spectrum of things in EHS, this fire and explosion thing has just been a part of it, but I started to kind of focus on it a little more towards the latter end of my industry career. And then I jumped into consulting around 2017, 2018. And from there, it’s just been, primary focus.
I don’t know if you and I have compared notes on that. I got to walk the West Pharmaceutical site as well when I was doing forensic engineering. And man, that was twisted wreckage. That was wild. And that was before I even really understood what a dust explosion was. And I was just kind of cutting my teeth, and I was actually still a student at NC State at the time, but that was wild.
Yes. It was, you know, joining that team and talking to people who lived it. And that’s one of the things that, you know, I love being on the prevention side, of course. The prevention side is where we all want to exist. But when I joined both of those companies after those events, I wanted to talk to people and kind of understand what they went through, because I think that makes me a better professional. So, I’m able to, when I go to sites to do an assessment, I’m able to say, Hey, if the worst happens, it’s going to be worse than you could possibly imagine in terms of the aftermath and all that stuff. So, I’m able to kind of, you know, share some of those stories. But yeah, it’s interesting.
And you know, crazy thing is when I worked for Fujifilm, and this is going to date me and it’s all part of it. Greenwood, South Carolina, there were, seven production facilities on site in a large distribution center. One of those facilities made VHS tapes. So now you’re going to have people Googling What’s a VHS tape. But, one of the incidents involved, so the coding process, you had the film, of course, but some of it involved raw iron and some other things. So, there was a release one day, and of course you had a bunch of burning embers and things on the floor. And again, I remembered one of my professors, when we talked about fire prevention protection, talking about dust. And it’s just, all these things started to connect. And it’s like you go from classroom to, Oh, wow, here it is. You know, that moment of being in shock and saying Here it is to fixing it.
So, that was early in my career. And then again, from that point on, just made it a point to make sure that, as you mentioned, a lot of folks aren’t aware of the hazard. I wanted to make sure I kind of dug into that at any company I joined to make sure that we identified the risk.
Yeah. And you hit on something very important just a second ago. And we were talking about this recently, how big the severity is. The likelihood is low for most cases and most facilities. And we’ve talked to people in the wood industry and I’ve been at wood shows and a guy walks up and goes, Oh, dust explosion. I’m more likely to get struck by lightning twice than I am to have a dust explosion. And that may be the case, but like you just said, it’s catastrophic when it happens.
Yeah. And the thing is, you know, there are the five elements in the dust pentagon, right? You need the fuel, the oxygen, you know, you need the ignition source, then you have the confinement and the dispersion, all that good stuff. Here’s the unique thing: most processes have, you know, three or four of those going on at any given time.
Yep. All the time.
And particularly in the wood industry, you know, if you’re dealing with the soft woods, there’s more resonance. You have a more reactive environment than you do working with the hardwoods. So, there are times when you’re probably seeing an electrostatic discharge. And it’s just at that point in time, you don’t have the right concentration, but you have all the elements there. And until you dig into your handling, because you’re taking this stuff and pneumatically conveying it. You’ve got propagating brush discharge up to 2000 milli-joules that can ignite most materials, definitely wood dust, but you just may not have the concentration in the line at that time. By the time it gets to your silo, you’ve got bulking brush discharges feeding into your silo. So again, sometimes it’s just, and I hate to use the term, the luck of the draw, by the time the event really happens…And you know, I’m a fire and explosion investigator as well. When you peel back the layers, you’ll see that that recipe was there, right? It’s like, you know, I tried my hand at baking, and there’s some times when I’ve left out some critical stuff and my kids told me, he’s like, this is nasty. You know, that kind of thing. So, you know, it’s just like that with your process. If all those pieces are there, and again, cannot discount the impact of electrostatics, you are just fortunate that the event has not occurred. But when it does, it’s again, usually catastrophic.
Yeah. It is kind of amazing to think about just like all of these things you can’t even see that may be playing a part in driving you towards an event or something like that. But you get a really unique perspective of being on both sides of the fence where you have been in industry and worked as a professional in preventing things for one company, but now working as a consultant. What is it that separates kind of the good from the great or the people that are prepared and the people that are unprepared?
I think it is just the idea of, and what I see is, you know, a lot of our client base is innovative companies. They have an R&D pipeline, moving things forward, creating new materials, new blends and all that stuff. Those organizations that really believe in, you know, people and assets and property and that customer satisfaction, those are the folks that are more open to the discussions about dust. Because what you do is you just have to say, let me map your supply chain. Here are the places where you are going to be impacted. And because they understand, and it’s like, okay, we care about our workforce.
There is nothing like doing an assessment. And walking the facility. And, you know, I try to be as personable as possible. I tell the story all the time. I have done an assessment where, you know, I grew up on anime, the Voltrons, Speed Racers of the world. So, I walk through a process and you will see maybe an operator that has some Naruto or some other stuff. And we kind of do the bond. And again, I am a WWE fan, I have been all my life. Nature Boy Rick Flair, Wahoo McDaniel, the whole lot. So, when you see that and you develop the bond, then we go back into kind of the conference room after we walked. And I will get on the board and I will draw, you know, stick figures and I will put the names over and I say, okay, unprotected, these individuals are no longer with us. And you can just see literally the faces drop and it’s like, okay, gotcha. Now let’s fix it. Right. And so again, there are some organizations unfortunately that, you know, to your point earlier, Jordan, it’s like, yeah, you know, I’ve got a better chance of winning a lottery or something like that. They just don’t understand. And it’s like, if you are receptive to the knowledge, if you’re receptive to the kind of the footprint of what’s happening, because not every explosion event makes the news because it doesn’t result in fatalities, but there are tons of fires and explosions that are happening daily. So, when you kind of bring that data into perspective and you make it real for that process, it tends to open them up. But sometimes it’s more of a pull from some folks than I’d like. But again, once you kind of work with them and understand their motivations. It’s like, you know, just doing this because our insurance company said we have to. Yes. But the insurance company is saying that for a reason, right? There’s some impact. But I have not found any organization that once you put all the pieces together, just absolutely says, ah, we won’t do anything about it, right? That’s the blessing. You know, you don’t have people who just totally, once they get the knowledge, ignore the hazard or the risk.
Yeah, they don’t stay around too long.
No, but it’s amazing to hear that like, this is not just a hazard problem, but it’s a culture.
It is, it’s an awareness and a culture.
It’s about how you are perceiving those that you’re employing that you are working with and working together alongside. And, you know, we have our core values here and we take them very seriously. And, you know, we kind of joke internally about like, you know, it’s not just something on the wall. And a lot of times people put that thing on the wall where it’s like safety first, but obviously they’re not doing it. So, that’s an interesting spin.
And again, safety geek from day one, safety should never be a priority. It should be a value. Priorities shift. Your priority is to get the best product out the door, but you want it to be a quality product, and you want to do it safely. That’s part of your value system. And that’s why it’s like, you know, even just that simple term, when I go places, I hear, you know, safety is our number one priority. No, you make widget X. That’s not a safety product. That’s something else. So, you want to do it safely. You want to follow all the regulatory, all that good stuff. Let’s make it part of your core value system. Let’s integrate it. Let’s mistake proof it. But again, safety should be more value than priority. Because that priority is going to shift.
Yeah. Safety’s a how, it’s not a what.
Right. Right.
We’ve been talking about Mike Rowe a decent amount here recently. I got to see him speak, and he was talking about safety specifically. He uses the phrase “safety second” with his crew. And it catches people off guard because they try to do that all the time where it’s “safety first.” And he’s like, no, our first job is to get the job done. He’s like, but we’re going to do it safely.
Exactly.
I love that. All right. So, you see a lot of these different cultures and mentalities and all these different perspectives on safety. And so, if you could give every plant manager one piece of advice for building a stronger safety culture, what would it be? Like, how would you help somebody move to that next level? Go from status quo, barely meeting the middle kind of thing.
I think it’s understanding the whole, you know, to use a buzzword, everybody talks about ecosystem, the whole ecosystem of production, right? It’s your inputs. It’s your people. It’s your equipment, all that, and realize that none of that happens with anyone that’s in a defect or injury mode, right? So, just like you measure OEE, that’s the big thing in industry, overall equipment effectiveness. I need that equipment here. We need the people to run it. You need your leadership teams. You need all that integration and stuff. And I know, you know, with the AI discussion, there’s talk of how that’s going to balance. We’ll never get rid of people, right? Because, you know, if there’s not consumers and you need people, then there’s no reason to have the AI, right? So, it’s kind of like that perpetual cycle. But I would just tell them, just look at the whole ecosystem of production and realize that, you know, safety is not a burden once it’s integrated into your process. It’s amazing, I’ve talked to so many leaders who understand lean concepts and, and mistake-proofing, but they fail to see how safety is the same thing, integrated into the process. The same thing that you’re looking to do in terms of making that production efficiency, produce it at the lowest cost, how does not providing a safe environment got to factor into that? And so, I would just say, yeah, look at that whole ecosystem and just say that you have, you know, capable, competent people in your process. Make sure they’re safe, make sure it’s integrated. And the thing that I learned a long time ago from mentors early on: as long as you make it easy to do the right thing, hard to do the wrong thing, very few people are going to choose to do the wrong thing.
And the other thing I always say is like, and heard this from discussions, because, you know, I had a lot of co-op experience through A&T, but you either hire idiots or you make them. So, a lot of people, Oh, this idiot did all this. Okay. Okay. You either hired the idiot, or you turned them into one. Either way, it’s a failure that can be fixed. And so that’s one of those things that I always, you know, listen for. Because a lot of times it’s, Oh, they got hurt. It’s their fault. No, let’s look through this. Rarely do people come into work and say, I want to lose a finger or I want to leave here in less capacity, right? So where did the process break down that caused that to occur?
That’s a good place to plug the book, Extreme Ownership. I don’t know if you’ve read that one, but it’s a Navy SEAL’s perspective on just as a leader, taking responsibility and ownership for a situation. And I think you’re all over it right there. Like great leaders will take responsibility and say, we messed up on this or we let the team down because we didn’t train them for that type of situation, that type of environment or put the safeguards in place. And that’s exactly what you’re talking about right there. You can prevent so much.
Yeah. And I love the tie-in to lean manufacturing because a lot of times, we’re just trying to streamline everything. And the recent trainings that we’ve been a part of, they’re like, Yeah, the sixth unspoken S of the five S system is safety. But they’re like, it’s unspoken. We don’t need to talk about it, but it’s like, you can’t build the whole system unless you have that at the forefront in your mind. So that is always a good plug for that. But so, one of the things on that same vein is like, we struggled a lot of times as plant leaders and the facilities that we’ve worked with to get buy-in, whether it’s a five S thing or it’s a safety thing from the frontline workers that are in it every day, because it’s easier, faster, quicker to do it in an unsafe manner sometimes, or we don’t have the proper guardrails in it. So, how do you either A, build that culture to be built around that, or get people to buy in?
So, this gets back to, and if I misquote it, apologies, but I think it was Deming who said that, you know, the upside-down pyramid kind of thing, where you start with the folks. One thing that always works, and it takes a leadership team that is really, really strong and believes in leadership. When I go through a process, and again, I’m focused on the explosion side, but you know, I can’t leave the EHS. I always look for the modifications and adaptations in the workplace. So, when it comes to fire and explosion, I’ll look for that hammer that’s sitting in the corner. Because I’m like, that shouldn’t be there, but somebody needs it for something. I’ll look for the footmarks on something that says do not stand. Right? Because it’s the what’s going on when you’re not there. So, the real way to build that safety culture and get to, you know, everybody talks about zero incidents. It’s possible.
My professor, Dr. Shaw back at A&T, he blew our minds. He said all incidents are preventable. All. And you know, we would throw examples up, and he would go through kind of a root cause thing and we’d be like, Oh, okay. So, the thing is, and a lot of folks, you know, it’s hard and this is where you have to be, you know, aligned with your HR team. When you have your safety team meetings, don’t let them be donuts and coffee things. I mean, reward folks for accomplishments. But if you have in your process, if you say, I’m going to have an amnesty day where you can tell me what you’re doing to shortcut to get the result. And again, you’ve got to get HR on board. So now we’re going to write a bunch of these on the board. Now there’s some, we’re going to say absolutely as of tonight, don’t you ever do again, but we’re going to look at it and say you’re doing it because you think it’s a means to an end. How do we fix that? And so, you know, it takes some time because people have to believe it.
That’s why you have to be one of those cultures that’s not blame-oriented. That’s not beating your folks up because they have to trust that there’s not going to be repercussions for it. Now, again, you do set some guidelines, Hey, after this meeting, no one will do this. And if you have to do a shift-to-shift stand down and do something immediate, fine. But what you do is you now get their buy in. And as you start to see, Hey, there may be a list of fifty things; we’re not going to do them all tomorrow. But we’re going to prioritize and we’re going to start knocking them down, then they buy into it. They work. You get more of that honest openness. And then for anything that you do moving forward, and I’ve said this before in several forums, integrate the folks who are going to have to do the task in the design, in the layout, because they’re going to give you the best.
And I think Fuji was where I learned that early in my career. We didn’t put anything in without operator involvement. And they knew, so they could tell us that’s not going to work. I know that’s not going to work. That’s a 50-pound roll. So then you’d make modifications. So, I think if you do those things and make it a truly integrative process, you can achieve the zero incidents. And again, for me, looking at fire and explosion, I look at a lot of that. So, when I do fire investigations or explosion investigations, I’ll do a fault tree and I’ll do a failure mode. And I include a lot of human element stuff. And it’s literally, there have been times where the results of the explosion occurred because there was not an automated way to do some task. The operator who knew the most about it was going on vacation. It’s that scenario that you, you know, you throw out there as a hypothetical, it happens a lot. And the new person coming in didn’t realize they had to clear this system manually before starting up. And it resulted in a, no one got injured, but it was major property damage.
Man, what I love about what you’re talking about right now. And I don’t know if this is just the Kevin Jeffries way and the Kevin Jeffries mentality or the Fike way, or just a combination of both, but so many people I feel like that are doing something similar to what you’re doing. They’re focused on number one, the equipment and number two, the process, the documented process around that. But you’re peeling the layer back on this onion and really getting at what is the safety culture, what is really going on in reality, not just what’s written down on the piece of paper, and how do we shift that? How do we change that rather than just building a better piece of equipment or putting up another sign or having another documented policy that’s in some engineers’ file cabinets.
Right. And I will tell you, I think that’s why my relationship with Fike is so good. Again, I’ve known the people here for years, and we would talk, and it’s just, you know how it is. It’s kind of like with you. I mean, we can talk about things that are, you know, you’re human, we’ve got technical stuff, but we got the human element. And joining Fike, it was a no-brainer, but it took probably more time than I should have taken to jump in. But that is just our way. Our way is, you know, we say protecting the people, property, the assets, all that stuff. And we mean it. And we recognize.
And that’s why it’s such a, again, I’m not fighting internally a belief system. It’s more like, this is the marriage of how I’ve been trained over years, how I’ve operated with an organization that’s doing the same thing. And it’s like, what is the best solution that addresses all those things? And I will say that, you know, throughout my career and building the network, I’ll tell people, you know, once I meet you, you’re part of the network. I don’t meet strangers. I know you for life. You know, I’m a stalker in a good way in that I won’t follow you, but anytime you need me, you can find me. I’m always available. But it’s just people who believe in that, too. That it’s a stretch, and it’s never going to be easy, but we know that we can, you know, achieve that zero-incident culture, that zero-incident scenario. And it may involve some equipment changes, it may involve some additional training. It’s a lot of things. So yeah, it’s just been a good relationship for me, joining the team.
I love it. Any current projects or initiatives that you’re excited about? What are you guys working on? Anything that you can share?
Without, you know, giving the clients’ names and everything…It’s interesting, there’s the statistic that says that over 70% of manufacturing processes have some bulk solids involved, right? 90% of pharmaceutical, you can break that down. So, this dust thing is not going anywhere. What’s interesting is that the new technology that’s going in, the signals, the monitoring, even integrating robotics, now you’re adding in some instances, a new failure mode and a new source of ignition, right? So, it’s just interesting to see how all of that now is connected. And even with, and this is a crazy thing when you look at failure modes, the internet of things, right? The fact that you’ve got equipment that’s connected, and somebody can tie into that piece equipment in another location, right? You got your cybersecurity element that, you know, a hacker can come in and say, Now I’m going to take your mixer, and you had a tip speed of less than one meter per second. I’m going to crank that baby up and see what happens. Those things are very important as you kind of take a look at it. And again, it’s that kind of that full-spectrum approach.
So, I think now in terms of, and it’s a broad range of projects, it’s getting involved from the design stage to construction, right? So even with dust, there’s the building code that says it has to be type one or type two construction. So, when you’re working with folks and you’re going through the permitting and you’d say, Okay, what state are you going to build this in? You know how the AHJ operates there. You’re going to say, Hey, these are some things you want to make sure are part of your construction design. So, I think it’s just that idea of there are more people who are looking for that complete approach. And the fact that we can kind of jump in and say, we’ve got something for, you know, once we even do this analysis, if you need, you know, policy development, we can do that based on this. If you need additional training capabilities, building for your workforce, all that good stuff. On the Fike website, we’ve got some learning modules and things that are available. So, that’s what I’m excited about. And the fact, again, this bulk solids thing is not going anywhere. It’s a part of core manufacturing, but making it safe is pretty cool.
Yeah, that’s amazing. And I think it is one of those things that we have talked about because, you know, everybody’s got to have the AI conversation of like, how does this impact our industry? Where are we going? And Kevin said nowhere. Everybody’s still going to be making dust because we still got to make stuff because people are still consumers. So that’s great to hear, you know, just from a continuous improvement standpoint, and then like, even our ability to help more people. And with those being the current things, like where do you see the industry going? Or where do you think we need to get to as a safety industry?
I think we need to make sure, and this is something that again, through the industry experience, we need to make sure that we speak the language of manufacturing operations and the folks in the C suite, right? Sometimes we, what is it? We stand on that, Hey, it’s the right thing to do. It is, but that’s not the language of the decision maker, right? So, the more that we can kind of speak in those different languages and, like I said, the supply chain interruption, the what’s it going to do to the brand and the image? If you look at a lot of these explosions and things that have happened with dust lately, a lot of them are in areas where, you know, the community worked there. So, when the place explodes, it’s impacting homes, right? So that risk C suite person, you know, hey, this is that impact. People are going to forever associate our brand with this. What do we do to prevent it? Okay, now that makes sense, right? For the person who believes in people, Hey, we’re going to teach them a new skill set, new capability. But so, there’s a way, you’ve just got to know each person’s language. And I think that’s where, if we look at the future, it is, No, I’m not just engineering. No, I’m not just EHS. I’m not just operations. You know, we are part of the ecosystem. Let’s build it. Let’s make sure that our individual interests are taken care of by working with the other folks in the chain. Right? And I think that once you do that, again, zero defects, equipment uptime, less injuries, all that good stuff.
Culture and communication.
Yeah.
That’s where it is. It always seems like such a goofy or simple thing. Because we spend so much time talking about efficiency or uptime, downtime, defects, whatever. But if you’re not peeling it back to the root issue of the people that are doing the things, then you’re not going to get buy in. You’re not going to get results. You’re not going to get whatever it is that we need to be at that point where we can do zero defects, zero accidents.
That’s the why. What you’re talking about is getting to the why. And we get there through communication. Clear communication.
Yeah. And even kind of zooming out on it, like thinking about this at a macro level, you’re talking about how it impacts a brand and like the things that you have to think through. Like Toyota has made a reputation because they’re the grandfather of lean, right? I mean, they make good cars because they have good processes, but people just think about them as this gold standard of safety and manufacturing and efficiency. And so, they’re like, absolutely, I’m going to buy that.
Yeah. And you know they’re going to do the right thing. They recently replaced a whole bunch of engines in a lot of vehicles. Ask me how I know.
So I heard.
Yeah, ask me how I know. But it didn’t cost me a thing. And they called me and said, We’re replacing your engine. It hadn’t even broken yet. Okay.
And that brand reputation, right? You know, product stewardship. And I go back to my days at Fuji. That was huge. What is the impact on the end user? Like, we made the one-time use cameras. And we called them that. You know, they were not disposable. Once you took it to be developed, we brought it back and we reclaimed every component that we could. And it would still meet a high quality standard and go back out in the public, so it didn’t go to landfill, right? And so it was this internally, you know, anybody who said, Hey, you know, we’ve got disposable…until you learn, no, it’s a one-time use camera. Now we’re going to go through and do this. So, you know, I’m going to support those businesses, those products that I know care about me as a consumer, right? And and so, yeah, it’s brand building and all that good stuff. And that’s, again, part of communication and language. The folks in the business will understand that. Now is your job to say, how does this safety thing integrate into that? And I’m speaking that language so they understand it.
Yeah. Because safety is one of those departments. Like I work with supply chain, and it’s one of the departments where when everything is great, no one should never know that you’re in the building.
That’s right.
Because when something goes wrong, everybody’s going to be beating your door down.
Everybody’s going to be beating the door. Why did these people get hurt? Let’s dig into it. And I’ll tell you, you know, more to come. And the other piece is your safety person or persons or department should be at a point where you talk about this smooth, even process where they’re able to look five, 10 years ahead. Where they’re looking at innovation pipelines, where they’re looking at R&D. Because again, if you are in a competitive market, your R& D pipeline is sometimes the difference between you getting the market before other folks. Well, if your EHS folks are now looking at 10 years of innovation and they’ve already decided what to say, that’s great. But if they’re sitting here and then again, culturally, your safety person should not be that person that, Oh, somebody got hurt on this production line, call safety. At that point, there’s a total breakdown.
That’s not safe at that point.
Everything is broken down at that point. Because now it’s like, Okay, well you directly manage the person, etc. But it’s that kind of thing where you say, Let’s look at where that breakdown occurred. But they should be in that position where they’re looking five, 10 years ahead. And again, we always talk about the value add of the role, value add of the person. And that’s where that value is. It is, you know, where are we building our next facility? Well, now I can look at zoning. I can look at this. How’s this going to affect the water, the air there? Am I building in an attainment zone or a non-attainment zone? All that stuff. That’s the value of EHS. It is not safety cop.
Yeah. It shouldn’t be a burden. It should be a partnership, right?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
And it goes back to communication.
Yeah.
Engagement. Man, this has been awesome. I love talking to people that are passionate about what they do and that enjoy what they do. And it is very evident that you are both of those. And so, I just enjoy hanging out and talking with you. And so, I really appreciate you taking time to check in with us today.
Thank y’all for having me again. It’s easy when like minds come together. So, I say the same thing about you. I’ve known you for a number of years, and we’ll keep this thing going.
Love it. All right. That’s it.
Yeah, thank you so much.
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