From Zero to Certified in One Year

In one year Life & Safety took a manufacturing facility with no safety personnel and a six month back log of unfiled documentation to being ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certified.

Company Overview

From a single lathe in a basement to a multi-billion dollar global manufacturing company, Linamar has come a long way in its short history. Today the company operates 48 manufacturing facilities around the world. The company’s precision products provide the light vehicle, commercial truck, off-highway, energy and industrial OEM markets with powertrain system solutions. Linamar’s skyjack brand is a global leader of aerial work platforms to the construction and access markets.
SOURCE: http://www.linamar.com/about?lms=section0#overview

The Situation

In the fall of 2014, Linamar’s 177,000 square feet machining and assembly facility in Arden, NC had a vacant EH&S position which had been left empty for at least six months. This location employs over 160 people, and in order to remain compliant and have a safe workplace, there is a lot of ongoing inspecting, training, and documentation that has to be done on a regular basis. Six months with little to no safety oversight left a substantial gap in Linamar’s EH&S requirements.

The Solution

Life & Safety placed one of their senior safety consultants, Kelly Kanaley, at Linamar so she could perform the necessary gap assessments and get Linamar caught up on their documentation and training. For the next couple months Kelly worked diligently with the plant employees and management to create a workplace that fostered a safe work environment. She was also instrumental in creating the new hire and contractor orientation training programs.

During the time that Kelly worked with Linamar, Life & Safety found and recruited a new safety professional, Jordan Blazer. In January of 2015, under the supervision of Kelly, Jordan began working full time at Linamar as a Life & Safety consultant. This arrangement empowered him with the tools and resources necessary to maintain an effective and efficient safety program.

By using Life & Safety’s consultant tools, online learning management system, and vast pool of specialized safety professionals Jordan and Kelly were able to continue the momentum that began the previous fall.

The consultant tools Life & Safety have been using and continuously updating over the past 18 years provided Jordan with the forms, files, documentation, and dashboards needed to run a safety department. Life & Safety’s online learning management system (LMS) provided a centralized location for delivery of training and storage or training records.

The LMS gave Linamar the ability to quickly run meaningful reports for the purpose of gauging training compliance and track training expiration dates. Life & Safety’s pool of safety professionals provided much needed services such as environmental testing and audits and arc flash assessment, labeling, and training.

In November of 2014, another of Life & Safety’s consultants, Cameron Colby, began working with Kelly, Jordan, and the Linamar NC leadership team on developing the framework necessary to support both an ISO 14001 Environmental Management System and OHSAS 18001 Health and Safety Management System for the facility.

The first phase of implementation was the development of a joint Environmental, Health, and Safety manual for the site. This encompassed implementing a mechanism for the identification of environmental, health, and safety hazards and risks to the facility, and subsequently creating the site’s performance targets and objectives as they relate to the reduction and elimination of the identified hazards and risks.

The Results

In just one year, Life & Safety took a facility that had no safety personnel and had a back log of six months of unfiled documentation to being ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certified.

Both the ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 systems implemented at the Linamar NC facility earned certification status in November 2015. The ISO and OHSAS standards are carried out with the spirit of continuous improvement, and as such, the systems implemented to achieve these certifications will be sustainable in reducing environmental impacts of business operations and reducing risks to the employees’ health and safety.

Testimonials

Nicole Grein – Linamar EHS Specialist

“Before Life and Safety Consultants, Inc. was brought on board we at Linamar had an Environmental Health and Safety score of 160 placing us squarely in the red zone. With our company having a score of 10 or more non-compliances identified places us in the red zone! We needed to be below 9 to maintain the yellow zone or even better, below 5 to be green. Since Life and Safety has been here aiding Linamar in achieving the ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 we dropped from 160 down to a 9 which says we are well on our way a steady green future.”

Don Snizaski – President, Life and Safety, Consultants

“Linamar should be proud of what they’ve achieved…I know we are. Working with companies and helping them continuously improve their safety culture can be rewarding. This project was one of those. It was by no means easy but that’s never the point. It was effective. The certifications, programs, training, documentation etcetera are all great but at the end of the day we helped create a safer workplace…that’s the point.”