Manufacturers Association for Plastic Processors: Safety Best Practices Award

MAPP's leadership team knows that innovative and unique solutions extend through all parts of an organization. For that reason, in 2018, MAPP introduced its Safety Best Practices Award. Each year, MAPP will solicit submissions from members that showcase how they have made their company and their team safer during the last year.

This award seeks to celebrate, recognize and share best practices from MAPP members in safety. Winners of this award receive recognition at the annual Environmental, Health & Safety (EHS) Summit, along with recognition in MAPP's national publications. As with MAPP's Innovation Award, all submissions are compiled and sent out to the MAPP membership for anonymous voting.

Submissions for the Safety Best Practices Award generally align with at least one of the following topics: employee safety training, safety committees, safety audits/walk-throughs, emergency training, behavior-based safety, tracking/displaying safety metrics, equipment and mold change safety, safety communication or other innovative facility safety best practices.

Jump to:

2021 Best Practices Handbook
2019 Best Practices in Safety Book
2018 Best Practices in Safety Book

2019 Best Practices in Safety

2018 Best Practices in Safety

Submissions from 2018 Safety Best Practices Award Winners:

All-Plastics - Improve. Communicate. Reward.

IMPROVE: At All-Plastics there is a visible team commitment to health and safety practices. We have a 6S Program in place that is modeled after the Lean Certification Competency and Behavior Model. We utilize the Green, Bronze, Silver and Gold measurement systems to drive organizational safety practices, continuous improvement and awareness. Our plant is sectioned off into 10 zones to optimize workflow and efficiency. Each zone is assigned a Zone Leader and they are responsible for ensuring all 6S practices are followed in each zone daily. The zones are audited by team members weekly and logged by utilizing audit sheets. The audits and graphical statistics are visually represented on each zone board in each associated area of the manufacturing plant.

COMMUNICATE: Quarterly 6S committee meetings are held for the designated facility team and open to all employees. The facility team discusses the “newspaper” from each zone which represents a list of things to be done within the specified area that would require investment or shut down. The quarterly safety record is also reviewed with supporting reports if an accident was recorded. Lastly, the facility team reviews all employee suggestions for continuous improvement and votes on the top three for award and recognition. There is additional regular facility-wide communication on health and safety through trainings, visual zone boards, safety signs, distribution of monthly Narrative and Matrixes, and staff meetings. There are standardized work practices in place that were developed by floor leadership to expedite learning, prevent mistakes and create a safer environment.

REWARD: All-Plastics has an employee acknowledgement and award system in place to celebrate Safety successes. Employees are recognized and celebrate as a team with monthly catered meals for no accidents/ recordables. In addition, an Employee Suggestion Program is in place for team members to share ideas how to improve plant safety and streamline manufacturing processes for health and efficiency. The facility 6S team reviews all suggestions and chooses three top winners per plant, quarterly and annually. Winners receive cash prizes and additional recognition in front of their peers at the annual employee appreciate banquet. At All-Plastics we view continuous improvement and safety as an investment, not a cost.

Automation Plastics Corporation - Dozuki Tablets & Safety Walks

Automation has been conducting “Safety Walks” for a number of years. In general, the program has been effective in addressing safety concerns and keeping safety awareness in the consciousness of the organization. In 2016, Automation adopted the use of the Dozuki platform for electronic Work Guidance and QMS Documentation Control. Dozuki has proved to be an amazing tool for development, control, and presentation of work instructions, supported by extensive visual reference files, on 10” tablets at the production cell. As we became better acquainted with Dozuki we discovered that the platform was very adaptable to a variety of uses beyond Work Guidance. Before long we were using Dozuki to conduct orientation and safety training, to document productivity and set up activities, to archive historical data, and to communicate important information within the organization. Every employee has a Dozuki user
account with customized privileges, and has secure access to all of this from any device with an internet connection. Recently a member of our Safety Steering Team identified an opportunity to transform our traditional Safety Walks, through the use of Dozuki tablets, into an exponentially more effective and efficient program. This project is now beginning to yield concrete results in the form of:

Data and statistics, that can be easily analyzed and filtered through both Dozuki’s Dashboard functionality and downloadable .csv files;
Real time preservation, organization, and presentation of audit findings;
Significant labor savings of over 50%;
Enhancements to Steering Team review and timely response functionality;
Ability to adapt and concentrate the focus of succeeding Safety Audits based on recent safety incidents or on concerns identified by analysis of the accumulating Audit data.

Nicolet Plastics - Robust Safety Training and Safety Culture

To help create an attitude-based safety culture, we feel that safety training is foundational. Safety training starts on day one of employment with new employee safety orientation and builds from there. The Safety Coordinator conducts the safety training and the facility safety tour. The coordinator uses a New Employee Safety Orientation Checklist. The contents of the checklist are based on the position. The checklist covers all the important safety programs that they must know before initial assignment, Nicolet’s safety policies, accident/near miss reporting, how to use the intercom system for emergencies, and a facility safety tour. The tour includes: where to find first aid kits, fire alarms, eye wash stations, exits, evacuation rally points, tornado shelters, material handling equipment areas, and a basic overview of injection molding machine safety.

Annual Bloodborne pathogen, Lockout Tagout, and Hazard Communication training is conducted in house by either the Safety Coordinator or other subject matter expert. Also, there are annual drills that occur for emergencies. During Severe Weather Week in April, a tornado drill will take place on each shift; our annual fire drill takes place every June. During these drills, the Safety Coordinator observes the event to see how the employees and emergency evacuation personnel are responding to an emergency. The drills are timed and the observations are reported at the monthly Nicolet News employee meeting.
Since it is not always possible to conduct all of our safety training in house, we will also utilize outside resources to conduct training on-site. One example of this is in 2017, we had our local sheriff department come on- site and conduct ALICE training for all of our employees. ALICE is a set of proactive strategies that increases the chance of survival during an active shooter event. The officers that conducted the training presented to all of our shifts.

We’ve also had the company that manufactured and installed our overhead cranes conduct refresher training for our crane trainers, maintenance, production support center staff, and the Safety Coordinator. The training was on crane and rigging safety. These employees helped restructure the entire crane training program. The crane trainers conducted crane re-certifications for all of our current crane operators to make sure they were using the crane correctly and safely. If any operator did not pass the recertification audit, they would have to be put through the crane training program.

Plastikos - Well-Rounded Safety Focus

We focused on reviewing our safety programs in 2017 and conducted hazard analysis. We also brought in safety consultants to audit our facility. This resulted in an overall reduction to our incident rate. We also implemented pizza parties for every 100 days with no recordable accidents and we also increased awareness of near misses and how important it is to report them.

Safety Shoe Program: A sample voucher is provided for all employees who were required to wear safety-toe shoes.
Communication for PPE changes were conducted during monthly meetings for all employees.
Lockout Tagout Information: LOTO procedures were added to each individual injection molding machine (35 total machines).
Every 100 days we go accident free we have a pizza party
An announcement was made during our monthly meeting for Jan. 2017 to announce 200 days accident free
Hazard Communication - GHS Standards: A complete inventory was taken of 300+ SDS sheets in January 2017. All outdated SDS’s were replaced with current versions. A complete facility inventory check was also taken. Outdated products were removed, and some products were replaced with consumer product grade replacements, where appropriate. Any products missing an SDS were evaluated for their relevancy. The products were either thrown out or an SDS was acquired.
Communication for the HazCom updates were covered during a monthly meeting for all employees in Spring 2017. Continuous updates are ongoing
Plastikos Safety Committee: Our Safety Committee meets once a month to discuss safety topics and continuous improvement efforts.