2024 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 30th Annual Conference

Operational excellence is commonly defined as continuous improvement in all aspects of the business and business processes. Safety performance is one of those aspects of business performance that can lead to operational excellence. It is well documented that organizations that have and continuously improve safety performance also perform well in quality, cost and customer satisfaction. In all cases, we must see the opportunities for improvement if we are going to address them.

This presentation will focus on how managing and reducing risk is critical to continuously improving safety performance and operational excellence. In order to manage and reduce risk, we must see the hazards and other precursors that can result in injuries, quality issues, equipment failures, and other losses to the business. We will also illustrate how increasing the “inputs” to our business processes such as risk assessment results in a more complete understanding of our current reality and frames meaningful action planning to improve safety and business performance.

Participants will:
- Learn how the quality and quantity of inputs to safety and other business processes impacts the quality of our risk analysis and action planning.
- Learn how a simple Five Step process for Hazard Identification and Mitigation can improve safety performance.
- Learn how some simple tools can improve what we actually see in the workplace and how that translates to more meaningful actions.

Participants will leave with tools that can be implemented immediately to improve safety and other business processes that will contribute to achieving operational excellence.