There are many different industry terms when it comes to the manufacturing industry. You’ve likely heard a few of them yourself, and at times it may be hard to know what these terms mean. This is especially true if they’re referred to in an abbreviated form, such as the term OEE. But what does OEE stand for? What is its significance? Here’s everything you need to know.

Every manufacturing company strives to follow good manufacturing practices (GMP) in hopes of running a successful and profitable business. They all have a GMP definition to help them stay in line with the key elements of good manufacturing practices.

As far as occupational health and safety are concerned, the devil is always in the details. There will be countless safety hazards in every workplace and it’s up to employers to be aware of all of them. Some will be obvious to everyone while others will be easy to forget about or overlook.

Question: I just took an EHS role with a company that is working on cleaning up its safety programs and improving its safety culture. So far everyone talks a good game about safety and having a “safety first” mindset but I’m noticing that sometimes when I bring problems to management, the responses I get are frequently things like; “We’ll work on the safety stuff when all the other fires are out” and “We’ll put money in the budget to handle that issue next year.” It seems like these responses are sending mixed messages and I’m never sure how to respond. What’s a good way to handle these responses?

Question: After every significant incident we complete the “5 Why” process. This is supposed to help us identify more accurate root causes that will help us find better solutions to prevent recurrence except, it rarely does either thing. Most of the participants haven’t gotten a lot of training in this process and are afraid to discuss the hard truths about why incidents often occur and even worse, their solution to almost everything is to “perform retraining”. How can we move past this and start to get some value out of this process?

Question: We recently moved to a “wall to wall” PPE policy at our location. For us, this means safety glasses, earplugs, and steel-toed shoes must be worn at all times while inside our facility. This new policy has started to cause issues with the office staff who have to don PPE just to use the restrooms and break rooms which are located inside the actual facility. We really don’t want to have multiple policies or include a bunch of confusing exceptions. Is there anything we can do to make this work?

Question: I’ve been in an EHS role with the same company for over eight years and have recently decided to see what other opportunities might be available elsewhere. So far every company I’ve interviewed with has talked a great game about safety but I’m a bit skeptical. What can I do to find out what their safety cultures are really like?

Question: I’m an EHS professional and I work for a manufacturing company that operates in areas of the country where we sometimes get inclement weather that affects our operation. Every time we get bad weather, I’m asked to help decide whether we should cease operations or not, and every time it feels like I’m making the wrong decision. No matter what decision is made, we’re either going to upset Sales and Customer Service (who don’t work on-site) or we’re going to upset the workforce.

Is there a way to make this decision that doesn’t cause conflict and if so, how do you do it?

One of the first steps in securing the safety of a workplace is being aware of all of the hazards and risks that exist. However, some workplace hazards are easy to overlook and forget about. Just because something is a minor risk or isn’t perceived as a risk doesn’t mean that it can’t cause harm to employees. To make sure your business doesn’t miss something, we wanted to go over some of the most overlooked workplace hazards.

Question: Our company decided to put together a Safety Committee and we really want people to volunteer to be on it but it’s been a week since we posted a notice asking for volunteers and so far the only names on the list are salaried managers and supervisors—but no hourly workers. We really don’t want to start picking hourly works to join or make it mandatory but if we don’t get a few hourly names soon, we’ll have to do that.

How do we get hourly workers interested in joining our new Safety Committee?