William N. Wandmacher
is vice president and general manager for Smurfit-Stone Container Corp.'s Containerboard Mill and Forest Resources Div., Jacksonville, Fla.

Safety as a standard benchmark

by William N. Wandmacher

The following is excerpted from the keynote address given by William N. Wandmacher at the Pulp & Paper Safety Assn.'s Professional Development Conference. Wandmacher received PPSA's Executive Eagle Award for demonstrating a management philosophy where safety is a top priority.

Within Smurfit-Stone, we do lots of benchmarking. We measure overall machine efficiency, cost-per-ton, etc. Looking at those, you can begin to define how well a mill is operated. However, you can also look at another measure, safety, which has historically been expressed in the form of an OSHA recordable rate. Next, talk about attitudes and approaches to safety with management and people from the mill. After that, you won't have to go out in the mill to tell whether it's performing well because safety is the hallmark of an operation that does its absolute best with available resources.

The old benchmark—the OSHA recordable—is becoming less and less valuable. As those numbers continue to decrease, we're reaching the point where measuring them is no longer statistically important. In April, Smurfit-Stone's Containerboard Mill and Forest Resources Div. had six recordable accidents—an OSHA rate of just 0.8 for the entire 21 mills, 7 sawmills, and woodlands operations.

However, success in safety must be defined by the number zero. When I say "zero," I mean no lost time, no recordables, no first aid cases, no near misses—nobody gets hurt. All of management—from top to bottom—must believe that there is no ton of paper worth getting one person hurt. The greatest challenge we have as managers is to convince everybody that this is what we truly believe.

SAFETY AS A BENCHMARK. All too often we talk about safety on one hand while we talk about cost-per-ton, operating efficiency, and other business-related parameters on the other. We keep them separate as if we know safety is a moral thing we need to do, but we're afraid to talk about safety within the context of other business parameters. We want to say that safety is our number one priority, but we're afraid of having that statement put to the test.

We want to avoid the point in time at which we have to make a decision between safety and one of those traditional parameters. I will tell you that you cannot avoid that point in time. Those parameters, including safety, are interrelated, and to reach the vision of having an accident-free environment, you must address all of them. You must also be willing to demonstrate that when there's a choice between safety and another parameter, the choice is absolutely always safety first.

DEMONSTRATING SAFETY COMMITMENT. For many years, our industry has trained people to make more tons, run faster, etc., but we only began stressing safety in the last few years, and people don't necessarily believe us yet. Why not? Because we haven't demonstrated it, and if you don't, your people will continue to think that you are all talk and that you really do just want that last ton.

There are many ways to demonstrate commitment. At my company, we emphasize that safety requires discipline. This isn't necessarily a negative thing. It also means teaching, instructing, and developing a skill. We also need to be prepared if people don't learn, so that we, in turn, can learn to teach them more effectively. For example, in a number of our mills, if you have an accident, you go to safety school. It is a very effective program. Most employees that attend the school say that while they wouldn't want to go back, they did learn a great deal.

Hopefully, you'll never have to apply the harshest discipline—firing someone. If you can't get people to work safely, it is partially a failure of management because convincing them to do so ought to be easy. Although many people may buy into the concept of an accident-free environment, if you don't discipline the person who doesn't, people will question your true commitment.

Because a mill is a dangerous place, people think an accident-free environment is impossible. It doesn't have to be, though. For Smurfit-Stone Containerboard's mill group, in the first quarter of 2001, we worked accident free 99.9995% of the time. While we're only having accidents 0.0005% of the time, getting rid of the remaining ones won't be easy. From this point forward, it's about people. It's about leadership, commitment, and responsibility.