Safety, an enabler for sustainability

Typically, sustainability is one of the bigger goals of any modern organization. It is usually included in the company’s vision and therefore is also a part of the strategy. Sustainability is a term that companies are eager to use, but it is also often misunderstood and needs a proper mindset and skilled leadership. It consists of three important parts; People, Planet and Profit.

At the top level, it is obvious to say: “Safety of people and environment is a key factor of success”. In this sentence, we can find all those three parts of the word called sustainability. In our daily business, we can dig deep into machine or process safety, but we also must remember that all our actions should be suitable for the environment and be profitable. This understanding is a keystone of overall Safety and Sustainability thinking.

If an organization has a vision that is linked into a sustainable world and therefore to strategic thinking, it takes steps to that direction. By taking steps from strategy thinking to implementation, we are moving towards the world of safety operations.

One example of how to implement the strategy containing sustainability goals into daily safety operations is prevention of unexpected start-up aka Lock-out Tag-out (LoTo).

In the EU the basics of an unexpected startup are described in standard EN ISO 14118 and in the other hand, we have an Occupational health and safety management system standard ISO 45001. Connecting prevention of unexpected startup operations into a management system or internal standards is a way to take care of daily operations in the long term in a safe and sustainable manner.

The first step to assess where you are as a sustainable and safe organization is done by current state analysis. At this stage, we are interested to understand what the maturity of the overall safety is and concerning our example here, what is the maturity of the LoTo management system and operations.

At Etteplan we operate different kind of environments, health and safety situations. We are assisting our customers with complex safety situations and support the management in long term safety development issues and daily based safety operations. We can help you to climb the safety maturity ladder and achieve the highest sustainable and profitable targets for your business.