| Recently big fire occurred at a
big car steel plant and a car tire plant. The accidents are jeopardizing
supply of car parts for some of Japanese car assembly lines.
A safety consultant commented the main cause of accidents was cost
reduction done by each plant, but I do not agree with the comment.
To keep good quality with low cost and safety can be achieved at the
same time in stable core activities. Likewise, safety management without
deep considerations about cost is a house of cards.
Last year safety checklists for an atomic power plant in Japan were
found to be full of false records.
It typically shows checklists were products of unnecessary bureaucracy
of safety management.
In Japan an assessor of ISO9001 said that the excellent company has
many quality assurance people. But quality is made in product realization
processes, not by quality staffs.
Many quality staffs often mean low quality, because people in product
realization processes are easy to pass on their responsibility of
quality to the staffs.
The same thing can be said to the safety management.
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