Dalmia Cement, a leading manufacturer of the commodity, has an enviable safety record. Gaurang Baxi speaks on the basic principles that the company adopts to ensure occupational safety.
Manufacturing of cement involves various operations which expose personnel working in the plants to various hazards and associated health and safety risks.
The health and safety risks based on activity and nature of operations could be categorised as high, medium or low depending on frequency of exposure and potential consequences. The risks include but are not limited to working at heights, exposure to hazardous energy sources, movement of vehicles, entry in confined spaces.
The approach towards reducing the risks to as low as reasonably practicable in cement plants is categorised under the following areas:
Leadership and Governance: The interventions include:
a.Visible Leadership: Conducting safety observation tours at all levels in the organisation to demonstrate leadership commitment and improve employee engagement.
b.Governance:
- Implement a robust safety assurance programme to establish the current status of implementation of safety management system and standards and its implementation capability.
- Establish performance management systems for leading and lagging performance indicators to align with all stakeholder requirements
Organisation and Culture:
a.Establishing Proactive and Just Reporting Culture to ensure learnings from incidents are disseminated and actions implemented to prevent reoccurrence.
b.Ensure adequate resourcing of the health and safety function to facilitate culture change and integration with business.
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Improve competencies of stakeholders through conducting training pro?grammes at all levels. Improvement of trade skills (examples: scaffolding, rigging and slinging,) and behavior-based safety programmes are essential for hazardous work activities.
Risk Management :
a.Proactive Risk Management processes to ensure risks are controlled/mitigated through effective risk control measures with focus on engineering control of risks. The risk management will address the following areas:
- Identifying and implementing risk control measures for all routine and non-routine activities like planned shutdowns, maintenance and construction activities. The key risks control measures include Fall Prevention and Protection, Isolation and Lockout, Traffic Management and segregation of pedestrians from heavy and mobile equipment.
- Ensure robust management of change processes to capture changes in the working environment and people which can impact the risk levels.
b.Implementing safety management systems and integrating with other business processes to continually improve safety performance.
c.Engaged business partners (contractors and transporters) to increase awareness to ensure their participation in risk mitigation. Supplier and Contractor Prequalification processes integrated with a company’s procurement policies and programmes help ensure that contractors have competent people and standard equipment to perform high-risk activities.
d.Process Safety: Manufacturing of cement involves process safety risks (potential for fire and explosion) while handling conven?tional or alternative fuels. Engineered solutions to mitigate the risks involved in these operations need to be implemented after a thorough process hazard analysis.
e.Asset Integrity: There have been instances of structural collapses (steel and concrete) in cement plants which have led to multiple fatalities and business interrup?tions. To prevent these incidents, a structural integrity programme involving inspection processes and a risk-based action plan to prevent reoccurrence has to be monitored and implemented.
Logistics Safety
a.Safety during transportation of cement by road is one of the most critical areas where leader?ship influence can make a significant impact in risk reduction. The key focus areas include:
- Improved infrastructure in parking areas and basic facilities for the truck drivers for fatigue management.
- Use of technology to monitor movement of trucks by installation of RFID and GPS. This helps in providing valuable information to the stakeholders for improving perfor?mance and safety.
- Defensive Driver Training and Driver Recognition Programs
- Transporter engagement programs.
The effective implementation of the above interventions and risk control measures results in continuous improvement in safety performance and can help achieve sustainable safety.
(This article has been authored by Gaurang Baxi, Head (Safety), Dalmia Cement Bharat Limited).