Development of an advanced safety excellence system in automotive supplier industry

Abstract

In automotive branch producing cars or components the highest priority is mostly seen in cost factors, afterwards quality and delivery aspects are focused. Work safety is often on last spot. Why should it be a contrary priority sequence? 1. Safety 2. Quality 3. Delivery 4. Costs Only employees / operators working in safe environment within the company are able to produce good quality. Thus products can be delivered on time in required quantity and costs stay manageable. So work safety is fundamental basis for success in industry and must be handled with high priority. Safety is often seen as a topic not so prior not to say boring, most of the time it appears to be very technical and of course for experts and specialists. Bodo Marschall (Volkswagen AG) states that ¿Creating an organization with great safety not only prevents injuries! In detail he means ' Safety and health help to maintain, develop and promote capability and willingness of our employees to develop their competences in their respective areas of responsibility. This continuous improvement process contributes to our productivity'. [1] The aim of this Master's Thesis is to propose and create a cultural bridge for achieving safety excellence based on leadership decisions - coming from external COMPLIANCE motivation ending in internal COMMITMENT motivation. As a theoretical base of my investigation, I studied and analysed several safety management systems of automotive organisations. For that purpose interviews based on a checklist have been performed with top management safety representatives from OEM company (Daimler AG Stuttgart) and several first and second tier automotive suppliers (BMW Plant Steyr, ZKW Group Wieselburg, 4 Pollmann Austria GmbH Karlstein and finally Gebauer&Griller GmbH Poysdorf as the company I¿m working for). The practical part is a gap analysis in existing safety management systems comparing to the state of the art in safety excellence. The chosen way how to close existing gaps in safety excellence will be visualized in a 'safety house'. Finally, this Master's Thesis results in a recommendation instrument for any industry, but mainly automotive, how safety excellence can be integrated in existing management systems. Implementation steps are shown in a case study for Gebauer&Griller.