3 Ways Data Capture Can Help Your Manufacturing Team Prioritize Safety
Data capture and analysis can play a big role in keeping your manufacturing staff safe
Manufacturing teams are always on the lookout for better ways to improve their safety record, SOPs, and training protocols. If your team is one of the many trying to find more efficient ways to keep your employees safer, you may be overlooking your best resource for improvement: your data.
Tracking safety data may be a traditional practice, but if your team is just using that number to count the days since their last safety incident, you’re missing out on ways to improve training, build a safety-oriented culture, and even help prevent future accidents and injuries. It’s time to embrace a digital transformation in manufacturing and put your data to work for your health and safety team.
“What gets tracked gets measured, and what gets measured gets fixed.”
Many of your teams are likely already familiar with the process of data capture and analysis, but what they may not be familiar with is sharing that data across your entire organization to allow everyone to take advantage of the insights. If you’re not already capturing your data, you can find plenty of helpful tips on getting started, but for those businesses ahead of the curve, it’s time to start putting your data to work for you.
Build a Safety Culture
While many teams feel confident in their ability to prioritize safety, it’s really the job of your health and safety team to make sure everyone stays in compliance. And, being realistic, most of your employees are going to focus on their day-to-day workload over safety—not because they don’t recognize the importance of safety, but simply because they were hired for a specific job or area in which they excel.
This means to keep safety at the forefront of every task, you need to ensure that your organization builds a culture that prioritizes safety. What safety entails to your team can vary, but it should cover the big topics: personal safety, machine operations, and injury prevention. The data you already track can go a long way in making this happen.
Share Safety Stats
Be transparent with your team about where your organization ranks for industry-standard safety checks. If you’re in the top ten percent of safety trainings completed, celebrate that win with your whole team! And if you’re coming up short on safety violations for protective gear, ask your team what would help them adhere to industry standards better. Make sure everyone feels like they’re a part of the safety conversation.
Align Productivity with Safety
Few things illustrate a point better than a well-built chart, and safety data is no different. Compare your team’s productivity tracking with their injury and safety checklist data, and make the correlation strong. In many cases, cutting corners may feel like it’s saving time, but the safety risks tend to cause more production delays and problems in the long run.
“The small gains made in production by shortcutting safety seem to be worthwhile until an accident occurs. Then the gains disappear or even become losses in many cases.”
Embrace Technology Everywhere
Building a culture around safety often means more than simply bringing your data together, you’ll need to ensure your processes are aligned as well. If you’ve brought new automation software into your business, make sure your entire organization sees the product, understands the benefits, and implements it in their everyday tasks. This can include digital form software that makes it easier to invoice your clients but can also digitize safety checklists to streamline inspections. Even something as simple as an electronic signature capture tool can benefit both internal and external-facing employees, and synchronized tech stacks make a more aligned team as well as better collaborated data.
Improve Team Training
New technologies can often mean better ways of tracking and executing employee training, especially within the manufacturing industry. Whether it’s new employees, new machinery, or an entirely new product, your team is going to face regular training, and tracking it can mean better success for your safety record.
Better Progress Tracking
Migrating your team’s training to an online platform can make a substantial difference in how quickly those trainings are completed. Not only are these online modules easy to access for all technology comfort levels of your employees, but they’re also easy to see how many of them have been completed, which are lacking, and if anyone skipped through any sections.
Building Upon Your Existing Processes
By leveraging technology to enhance your existing training processes, you’ll be able to ensure that everyone has the same access to the training tools for their team. You can also set limitations on shift assignments if there are trainings or certifications required for different positions, ensuring everyone has the tools they need to do their job well and safely.
Leverage Better Insights
The number one thing that your business and enterprise data can do for your safety efforts is track exactly where your team is at. By knowing your baseline for accidents or injuries, machinery malfunctions, or even slips, trips, and falls, you can correctly correlate new safety trainings and processes with changes in those numbers.
Manufacturing technology has come a long way, but being able to implement it throughout your business is only step one of the digital transformation process. Pooling your data and using it to set goals and benchmarks for your entire team is where you can start to see changes and improvements throughout your organization.
Monitor Safety Data Closely
Everyone loves to see a timelapse chart with years and years of recorded data that show a positive progression over time, but that’s not going to be readily available—especially if you’ve just introduced some of this new tracking to your organization. Embrace the small changes and trends, even weekly, monthly, and quarterly insights can still give you valuable insight into trends and patterns for your business.
Pinpoint Key Data Points
Seeing a decline over time in your accident records feels great, but knowing what happened to make that line trend down is even more empowering. Make sure that you’re keeping an accurate record of all the changes in your safety processes so you know what’s working for your team and what isn’t. Whether it’s a drastic change in shift start times, or a smaller change in how your safety checklists are formatted, you’ll never know what the key to that success is unless you’re keeping a record of the changes you’ve made.
Never Assume You Have All the Answers
As any data scientist will tell you, even once you believe you know the cause of something, you’ll need to continue to track and verify that thought. It’s a fine line between correlation and causation, but confusing the two can pose substantial risks to your safety operating procedures. Ensuring you keep your new data tracking processes in place even after you begin to see positive trends can help you secure your safety standards well into the future.
The manufacturing industry as a whole may come with inherent risks, but prioritizing safety within your team can make a world of difference. New data capture systems and platforms make it easier than ever to track safety stats, productivity, and even machine health, and with the help of these platforms you can build a stronger safety plan for your entire organization.
About GoFormz
Move your forms online with GoFormz. We believe that everyone should be able to fill out their forms from anywhere and deliver products and services that redefine how people and businesses collect and process information. GoFormz is the mobile and online form solution to capture your data on any device and send it wherever you need it most. Through native integrations and an open API, take full control over all your manufacturing data to mitigate and better manage safety risks.
