thyssenkrupp Industrial Solutions South Africa (tkIS SA) is once again celebrating one million Lost Time Injury (LTI)-free hours. Quality, health and safety manager for tkIS SA, Christo de Beer talks to MechChem Africa about Vision Zero, the underpinning initiative that enables the company to repeatedly achieve critical safety milestones.
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“We are a global OEM that offers mining, cement, mineral processing, bulk materials handling and chemical plant solutions. We are building complete plants and are also routinely called in for upgrade, refurbishment and shutdown work on sites here and across Africa,” begins De Beer.
From the company’s Sunninghill head office, tkIS takes on the full engineering, procurement construction and management role for Greenfields and Brownfield expansion projects, while its Chloorkop Service Centre accommodates aftermarket services and the manufacture of spares and consumables.
“At any one time, we have a number of field services teams on construction sites, installing equipment or looking to repair damaged units or to extend the life of older assets. These teams are made up of our own employees and contractors, but in terms of safety and LTI statistics, as contract managers we are accountable for every employee under our control. All the hours worked by our employees as well as all onsite contractors count towards the safety record and an injury to any one of these employees counts against us,” he points out.
tkIS’ Vision Zero initiative, in operation for the past five years, strives towards zero injuries for all employees, including contractors and visitors involved in projects managed by thyssenkrupp. “At its starting point, are zero tolerance for unsafe behaviours and conditions, zero compromise on safety and health as well as a pursuit for zero impact on the environment and communities,” says De Beer, adding that key to the success of this initiative is the hard work and dedication of all people and departments within tkIS, and the belief that safety is “a core value and an integral part of our everyday business”.
“Vision Zero is about taking ownership of safe operations across all of our sites, so as to deliver projects at high-quality levels without delays and at absolute minimum risks,” he notes.
“We received our first NOSA 5-star rating back in 2007 and have been tracking incident statistics and hours ever since,” De Beer continues. “The last lost time incident recorded against us was a motor vehicle accident in October last year, and this reset our previously recorded LTI-hours history. We reached 1 million LTI-free hours less than a year later, during the last week of September 2019 when we again went past 1 000 000 hours across all of our sites. If all goes well, by the end of October we will achieve a full calendar year without any lost time injuries,” De Beer reveals.
We have adopted best practices from all our business units and applied them universally, encouraging people to prioritise safety in their own workplaces and to take ownership of the risks to everyone’s safety. Management, leadership and visibility have been critical and we are now closer to seeing responsible attitudes and a safety-first mindset at all of our sites,” he tells MechChem Africa.
With respect to training, he says that all supervisors, safety representatives, safety officers and other key personnel undertake HIRA (Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment) training. “This involves developing a good understanding of their specific working environments, be they at chemical plants, power stations or mines, each of which presents its own unique hazards. If an employee cannot see the onsite dangers, then the safety battle is already lost,” De Beer believes.
An understanding of how to work on scaffolding, for example, and clearly identifying the most basic risks, such as avoiding spanners falling onto people below, starts to lead to measures that reduce anxiety and makes the work easier to complete successfully.
Pointing to a site-specific success, De Beer says that tkIS has just handed over a 310 t piece of equipment that took 12 months to design and 10 months to construct for one of the largest ongoing mine expansion projects. “This was achieved with zero onsite incidents, no LTI’s and no medical treatment cases,” he says.
“We train people to be aware at all times of the dangers and of the situational changes that may have increased the risks involved. We insist that formalised work procedures, including all tools and safety equipment required, are put in place in advance of each job. These ‘method statements’ detail exactly how the construction or refurbishment activity should be safely completed,” he explains, adding that the statements also include what to avoid and any actions that should follow a safety incident.
“As well as in South Africa, we work all over Africa: in Mozambique, Zambia, Ghana, Nigeria, DRC, Guinea, Mali, Ruanda and others, and Brownfield sites in remote areas of these countries present harsh conditions with high risks.
“Training, high levels of support and shifting the ownership for safety to onsite operation’s managers and every employee has enabled us to ensure that safety is equally supported at sites here and north of our borders.
“With OHSAS 18001, ISO 9001: 2015 Management Systems and NOSCAR accreditations in place, we continuously strive to improve our health, safety and environmental performance in order to consistently achieve our ultimate Vision Zero goals. It is imperative that we uphold high levels of safety at all times as it is intrinsic to every aspect of our business: our employees, products, services, the tkIS brand and, of course, our valued customers,” De Beer concludes.
Congratulating Christo de Beer and the whole team on their latest LTI success, Philipp Nellessen, CEO of tkIS for South Africa and the Southern African region says: “This is a fabulous achievement but only a first step. We need to strive to beat our 2010 record of 8.5-million LTI-free hours.”
