Ensuring Safety and Reducing Accidents Across Multiple Manufacturing Expansion Sites

The Client

Our client is the largest U.S. producer of pet food with over 75 years in business, and a subsidiary of the largest publicly held food company in the world.

The Business Challenge

Our client was rapidly growing and planning for multiple capital expansion projects. With safety, compliance, and worker protection as major initiatives, our client required a comprehensive site safety oversight solution to ensure adherence to internal guidelines, ISO standards, and OSHA regulations.

Frank E. Bird’s Bird Triangle, adapted from Heinrich’s Accident Triangle Theory, analyzed over 1.7 million accident reports to link near misses to various accidents. For every serious personal injury, there are 10 minor personal injuries, 30 damage-causing accidents, and 600 near misses (“Safety Triangle Analysis”, 2021). This theory demonstrates the cause-and-effect relationship between minor and major injuries over time.

In 2020 and 2021 alone, our client faced multiple non-fatal workplace safety violations, incurring over $865,000 in fines. Each injury resulted in an average four-hour facility shutdown for investigation, leading to an estimated $1.8M in lost sales per incident. Including worker’s compensation, health expenses, and lost worker time, the cost per incident was significant. Considering Bird’s Triangle, it was essential for our client to significantly reduce the number of incidents.

The Actalent Solution

Our solution is a bundled outsourced safety service supporting site safety at 14 customer manufacturing expansion construction project locations. We have 32 safety managers, each responsible for 2-3 trade contractors, reporting to one Actalent safety director or lead per site.

“Reducing accidents and improving safety performance can only be achieved by systematically focusing upon those unsafe behaviors at construction sites” (Choundry, 2014). Our safety managers perform daily Construction Resource Management Plans (CRMPs) for every contractor’s work. This systematic daily review before and after each shift ensures safe practices and fosters a safety-minded culture. Our comprehensive service ensures a strong and maintained safety culture.

Each safety manager:

• Provides a safety orientation to onboard new contractors to the site and site-specific standards
• Plans for and signs off on the contractor’s work each day
• Ensures adherence to client, ISO, and OSHA safety standards
• Observes contractor work practices
• Manages incidents
• Notifies the client of all reportable incidents

Each safety director or lead:

• Assists with interviewing and hiring contractors
• Onboards the safety team
• Builds the team based on the project demands to ensure there is adequate coverages
• Manages schedules and assigns tasks daily
• Performance manages the safety managers and handles employer responsibilities

The Results

With our safety oversight solution in place, we have exceeded our client’s expectations. We have multiple sites with over 1,000,000+ man hours without incident:

• Two sites with over 1,000,000-man hours without incident
• One site approaching 3,000,000-man hours without incident

In 2023, we saved our client an estimated $5.4M in lost sales from preventable workplace injuries at these three sites alone.