Case Study Part 2

 Instructions

Safety Needs, Goals, & Objectives

Many of the items you recommended to the CEO regarding company culture were implemented resulting in higher awareness and commitment of the employees to environmental health and safety.

 You have not been tasked by your manager to explain why a serious problem exists and then to solve the problem. Over the last two years, some alarming apparent trends have been observed in the administrative, operating, and maintenance areas of the business.

• Cumulative trauma injuries (CTI) at your plant are up more than 60 percent in the last ten years. Injury costs associated with cumulative trauma injuries are up more than 85 percent over the same period.
• In the last two years twelve injuries due to inadvertently released energy have occurred to maintenance mechanics as they repaired equipment.
• Within the last year three trenches have collapsed, and one excavation involved the puncturing of an underground gas line. While no one was injured, work was slowed by the collapses and two people narrowly escaped injury in one collapse; there could have been a fire when the gas line was punctured.

Your preliminary investigation of the safety problem shows that all of the cumulative trauma incidents have occurred in the administrative areas of purchasing and accounting, and 100 percent of these injuries occurred with people whose job puts them at a computer workstation 95 percent of the time. The plant’s lockout/tagout procedure is two pages long, its contents would best be described as superficial, and no one has been trained in the use of the procedure. There is no permit system or procedure for performing excavations.

 To fix this safety problem (too many incidents), you first have to understand where and what the individual problems are. Even though at this point you are not sure exactly what you will have to do to fix the problems, you have to ask for funding, human resources of the appropriate expertise, and time to do the project now. You may not need all of what you ask for, but if you do not justifiably ask for what you need now, you will not get it later. There have been 27 injuries (CTI and energy-release) over the last two years from the three problem areas (administration, operations, and maintenance) and, in addition, work slowdowns due to the trench collapses and lost product have resulted in losses of approximately $225,000. Assume that industrial injuries cost $25,000 each. Please ensure that your proposed solution is economically justified. (While the human costs may be greater than the dollar cost, they are a very large unknown, so for the purposes of this exercise, do not attempt to consider human costs in your feasibility assessment.)

Assumptions and Constraints

A safety engineer’s rate is $5,000 per week, and they have incident and trend analysis expertise as well as procedure-writing and training capability. A civil engineer’s rate is $4950 per week,  and they have expertise in soils and underground infrastructure analysis. An industrial engineer’s rate is $5100 per week, and they have expertise in workstation analysis and design.

A mechanical engineer’s rate is $5100 per week, and they have expertise in piping design and layout and engineering drawings. An electrical engineer’s rate is $5200 per week, and they have expertise in underground wiring diagrams and electrical controls as well as engineering drawing. A medical doctor’s rate is $7800 per week, and they have expertise in medical examinations of injuries. An operations and/or maintenance specialist/technician’s rate is $3400 per week, and they have expertise in procedure-writing and training. An administrative assistant’s rate is $2200 per week, and they have a wide range of administrative expertise.

You have access to only one of each type of engineer except that two safety engineers are available. One operations expert, one maintenance expert, one administrative assistant, and one medical doctor are available to you. Each category of incident investigation will take one full week to complete. Each trend analysis will take 13.33 hours. A soil analysis at your plant is a week-long process, and an underground infrastructure analysis will take two weeks to complete, and if you hire a civil engineer for this work, these two analyses cannot be done concurrently. It will take three weeks for an ergonomics engineer to complete a workstation analysis, and if redesign is required, it will take another two weeks for a new workstation design to be developed. Identifying sources of energy and isolation points will take about three weeks for each category of energy—mechanical and electrical—but some of the energy sources may be mechanical (steam and fluids in piping, and so on) and some may be electrical, which is a different area of expertise. Any drawings from this work will take four weeks to complete (two for mechanical and two for electrical). Medical examinations of fifteen cumulative-trauma incidents will require a week’s worth of medical input. Procedures take approximately four weeks to complete (considering drafting, review, approval, and distribution). Presentation of the new procedures to employees will take two weeks, training your workforce of 500 employees will take eight hours for each employee for each procedure, and the maximum class size is 50 people per training session. The cost for trainees is approximately $2000 per week. The lockout/tagout course is eight hours and the excavation course is eight hours. You must account for a 35 percent fringe and overhead rate and a 12 percent general and administrative rate.

Expectations and Final Products

 Develop a needs statement, goals and objectives, and tasks for each problem area. The following format may be helpful in organizing your answers for each of the three subject areas.

Needs Statements

1. Subject Area Situation
    a. What is the need, Impact/Why  

Goals and Objectives

1. Subject Area Problem
    a. Goal
    b. Objective

Task Requirements and Task Statements

1. Requirements – subject area
    a. Each task
    b. 
    c. 
    d. 

  Submission

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