NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
David Carrol, Woodpro Cabinetry, Inc.
DR. RODGERS: Now we get to the experts. Woodpro Cabinetry is a small company where David Carroll has worked since 1982. He worked 13 years in the residential construction business, of which five were as a self-employed contractor before joining Wood-Pro. There, he started working in the manufacturing areas of lumber processing, final assembly, and the cabinet door production department before being promoted to Director of Manufacturing. David enjoyed his 14-year anniversary with Woodpro this year and is currently serving as the Director of Safety. He has successfully led Woodpro Cabinetry into OSHA's VPP program. Woodpro is the first cabinet company in the U.S. to achieve that status.
Woodpro Cabinetry's cabinet business began in 1977 and currently employs 100 people. In August of 1996, Woodpro advanced from being a merit site to becoming OSHA's highest level of participation at a star site, a record to be proud of.
Thank you, David. David Carroll is going to speak about his program.
MR. CARROLL: Thank you, Suzanne. It really is a privilege to be here. I think about what was said yesterday, and so much for the nice weather in Chicago. I called my wife. We're from the South Central part of Missouri, and they'd already gotten six inches of snow, and school's cancelled; and she's a school teacher, and my kids are in school, and they're happy about that. But I'm a little bit concerned about getting home, with airport and flights and so forth.
You might have noticed the absence of M.D. and Ph.D. in front of my title, and it wasn't just an oversight. We work off of our shirt sleeves, so to speak, in our small company. Suzanne said that I was Director of Manufacturing for a while, and that's true; and now I'm Director of Safety, and that's true, but there's about half a dozen other titles that I have to deal with. I'm doing some things, employee benefits.
I take projects. We just put a boiler in place and a storage silo, and all those take a lot of effort and a lot of time, and any program worth having, is worth putting some effort into. I can't say that we put every effort towards safety and ergonomics, but we have worked hard at it, and as Susan said, we are very proud to be in the voluntary protection program with OSHA.
I said we live way back in the sticks and the hills, in the Ozark Hills of Missouri, and back that far we don't think the Jay Foxworthy redneck jokes are funny.
We also manufacture bath cabinetry, and that bath cabinetry mostly is sold to the surrounding areas and, for obvious reasons, where they have indoor plumbing.
We are a small town. We are going to be celebrating our 20th anniversary in February, and I was just thinking if I could invite all of you folks we could double the population of our town, but we probably wouldn't know what to do with that many people.
In general, we purchase planed lumber, planed on two sides, and we take that lumber in our process, and we rip to width. We chop and cut it to length. We drill it, shape it, sand it, and that is pretty much the process that we use.
Also, we have a finish room and those parts go through the finish room, and we've chosen the after finish assembly method, and there's a couple of reasons for that. The components are finished in pieces, and it gives the workers a better control of the product. If we have a reject, you can just reject one part instead of the whole cabinet.
Several years ago we assembled everything first and then ran it through the finish room.
But the second reason for that is it's easier to handle the small parts. Many times the parts, even in a tote, are easier to handle than if it would be a large cabinet, trying to carry it around the shop or putting it on a cart or putting it on a roller conveyor. So we found that after finished assemblies have been a good approach for us at Woodpro.
Woodpro is a family oriented business. There's a lot of families and relatives that work there. We care about people, and safety was an issue early on as well, but we really didn't formalize our safety program until 1991. In 1991, we put a great deal of effort towards the safety guide, and that safety guide is constantly being improved. We work hard on keeping a lot of the latest OSHA standards in our safety guide.
When I think about what we have accomplished with the safety guide, you really don't accomplish much until you can get the people to read it and to use it.
I think probably the thing that helped us the most in our company is when we implemented self-directed work teams in 1993. That was a major hurdle for us as we began to develop these teams, and out of each of these eight production work teams, we have one person on the Safety Committee.
Each morning when they have a stand-up meeting, before all the noise and all of the machines are turned on, we talk about safety issues via the Safety Committee members, and the Safety Committee members do several things for us. They've learned how to have an effective meeting. They've learned how to brainstorm, problem solve, and work together on projects. We are very proud of our Safety Committee because they are very much interested. We prepare Minutes after a safety meeting and note the meeting highlights.
One good example is our policy where safety glasses have to be worn. One fairly new employee who has been there about three months, and who is also on the Safety Committee had typed up the Minutes on her home computer and put little color things in there and made it look all pretty. The owner of the company, Leroy, was walking through the plant with his regular street glasses on and stopped to congratulate her. She said, "Well, thank you, but you don't have the right safety glasses on." He was embarrassed about that, but didn't say anything to her. After he walked away some of the people went up to her and said, "Well, it's really been nice knowing you." She really didn't know Leroy that well. I talked to Leroy about it later and told him how funny I thought it was, and so later on I gave him the side shield and he went back out and told her he appreciated her saying that.
But that's what it takes. It takes people being accountable for each other, and people that care about people. I believe that our company is that way, that we do care about each other.
In May of 1994, Woodpro became the first cabinet manufacturer in the U.S. to be in OSHA's voluntary protection program as a merit site, and today we are at the star level. That is something that we are very proud of.
Just a few statistics that I wanted to share:
1982 was a good year for Woodpro. That's the year I joined the team.
We had two recordable injuries that year, and they were both mine. No. No, I'm just kidding.
In 1982, we had two recordable injuries, but we just had 16 employees, and that equates as a 12.5 percent recordable injury rate. In 1990 we had eight recordable injuries. At that time, we had 50 employees, and that equates to 16 percent. So you can see a trend building there. It bounced around some of the years between.
But also in 1990 our workers' comp costs were at $38,600. Some of these numbers are probably not as relative to you as they are to me, but as I go through those, then I'll kind of share a little bit more information about the numbers.
In 1992, we had 100 employees and 31 recordable injuries. That was the year I was promoted to director of safety. By the way, that was a lateral move.
The very next year, 1993, we had 13 recordable injuries and our workers' comp skyrocketed, because you know how workers' comp works. It looks at the previous years and equates that.
Our mod factor was 1.25 or 25 percent over the rate that it probably should have been or could have been, and our workers' comp costs that year was $103,824.
In 1994, we had reduced our accident and injury rate. Our mod factor was down to 1.17. That's the year we also became involved more in VPP.
In 1995, our mod factor was 1.07. Our workers' comp costs were down to $95,000.
It's interesting how the insurance companies like to hang on to that bad year as long as they can. They try to average that. Some of that was starting to drop off.
In 1996, this last year, our mod factor was down to 1.05. We had four recordable injuries, and our rates still dropped to $61,000 last year. We still are at the rate of 100 employees and for us, since 1993, that was $42,000 savings. To a small company like us, that's not chicken feed.
Just looking at more statistics, we've had a couple of carpal tunnel syndrome surgeries. The first case occurred in 1988 and involved somebody working in the face frame assembly area, using a nail gun. Some things have changed on that, and I'll talk about that in just a little while.
Another case occurre in 1991. We had several back strains, but most of our accidents are cuts and scrapes and those types of injuries. The CTD injuries were not the most frequent but they're undoubtedly the most costly. They cost more because in just about every case the employee had to be off work for a while. There were lost-time incidences.
So those are the areas that I started to work in. I'd evaluate a department by myself. I'd look at it, identify the jobs, the things that could cause injuries. I'd draw plans to prevent those problems. I'd get all excited about a project and say, "This is what we need to do." Somebody would come up to me and say, "Well, why would you want to do that."
So I had to take another approach, and I had to use the people's side of it. I'd say something like, well, you know, Frank had a back injury over there, working at his work center, and I believe that all accidents are preventable.
If somebody gave me a funny look on that, I'd give them about a five-minute speech about how accidents really were preventable and try to get them to buy into that. I think we have to have that approach. We have to get beyond the point where we say, "Well, you know, it's just an accident, it's just going to happen." We have to realize that all accidents are preventable.
I'd say, "What do you suppose we could do to change that work center, to make it more user friendly, to make it easier to do the job, to make the job even faster, to reduce twisting and turning?" And, you know, people began to buy in. People in other departments would see an improvement in one area, and they'd say, "Well, we want one of those things in our area. We want one of those tables or those clamps."
We have to understand that any effective program is going to take a certain amount of buying. It's going to take people working together, communicating, seeing how things work, because there's always a certain amount of resistance to any change.
Our company's product line has changed drastically over the years that I've been there and if you'll notice that back in 1992 we had a hundred employees, and today we still have just under a hundred. That's not because we've not grown, we've gained a lot in productivity. We're producing a lot more cabinets with the same amount of people. Some of it's machinery, but a lot of it has to do with layout and people answering questions and being a part of the team.
I have just a few "Before and After" picture slides to show you some of the things that we have done. This first picture -- and, unfortunately, they look a little darker here than they did when I took the pictures and showed them to myself -- but these are pretty fresh, too. It's interesting. When you live in a small, rural area, we have a Wal Mart not too far away, about 10 miles, and I took these pictures over to have them developed into slides, and they said, we can't do slides in one hour, we have to send those to Berryvill, and that takes a week. So I couldn't do that.
So I had to take it to the next town, 70 miles, to have these developed in two hours, so there's a story behind these slides.
But I wanted you to notice this conveyor where our cabinets are finished is up about knee high. Steve is 6'4", and what he is doing on this line is putting the drawers in and the false fronts are already put on, and the drawers are put in and aligned. You get the idea that we have a wide variety of people, and we have to make the job kind of fit the person.
Most of the people that work in that area are a little on the tall side, and we do have a lot of job rotation going on in that area. So Steve's putting the drawer fronts in the cabinets.
This next slide is just a picture of our cabinets that leave the area where Steve is working, and the conveyor is dropped down because people aren't doing things to the front of the cabinet, they're doing something to the top. They're pushing them. So they're pushing the cabinets down the line, and they're ready to go to the truck in a shipping area.
This slide shows an area in our finish room where we have conveyors up off the floor, and the parts are taken off the track or they're staged on the track in our finish room. You can see most of our parts are handled in totes. In this picture I wanted to show you what we were doing with conveyors. We've got what seems like miles of conveyors; and conveyors have their own set of challenges. You also have to get over them, and so you have to build steps and rails to make those work out right. But conveyors certainly keep us from having to lift heavy totes.
This is just another picture of some of our conveyors, and these have been lowered just a little from where they left the upcut saws, and Cindy's pushing these totes down the line and these are the cut components; they're being drilled, shaped, and sanded in that process as well.
This picture is typical of most plants and what people typically do in them. There's a tote sitting on the floor and Carla's reaching way down inside of it. She'll do that 25 or 30 times a day, reach down inside that tote and get those out. I said "Well, Carla, where are you getting your parts?" And what had happened was that the conveyor was running over with too many parts, so she'd set one off on the floor, which seemed like the wrong thing to do. It's a continual process to get people to learn how to use their totes and use those heights, but it didn't seem to be bothering her at the time to reach all the way down to the floor. After I came out and took a picture of it, then right away she moved it up on the conveyor.
This is a picture of Melvin putting a 4x8 sheet of plywood on our beam saw. A beam saw is a flat saw; it's a horizontal-type saw, and it's got some grippers, and it's key computer operated. Typically to lay a sheet on it you have to put yourself in this awkward position. This is where he's holding that sheet, and when he lays it over, his back is in this awkward position.
Before this saw, we also had a vertical beam saw, and it still required manual lifting; but what you really have to do in an area like this, and for us a pretty big investment is a scissor lift [picture], now we set the full bundles of plywood on that scissor lift with a fork lift, and then Melvin can just slide that across to use that beam saw.
Norman is working in the finish room. We just recently changed our line because we need more dry time between the stain and the seal coat. To do that, we had to run the track around another area and add a booth.
What I wanted to show you in this picture is this track, when it came across here, it drops about six inches and it comes down before it comes down this line, then goes on up to overhead.
The point I wanted to make on this slide was that the finish room team said "We'd like to have that track lowered a little bit, because our hands are having to go above our shoulders to take parts on and off the track." We decided we'd spend a little extra effort, and we didn't do it just for that reason, but we lowered it for those people to give that extended dry time. That was people-driven; I didn't have to go out and say "Let's look at this before we do it." The people in the finish room knew they needed that done.
The finish room is always a challenge because of all the movements of your arms and spraying, and so forth, and trying to keep your hands below your shoulder height, and the triggering and so forth. The finish room probably has been one of the most challenging areas for us to reduce repetitive motion, because if you rotate from the top coat booth to the sealer booth to the stain booth, you still have all the same motions; and there's some sanding that takes place and some loading and so forth taking off the track.
The wipe station is a little bit different set up motions, and we do have a flat line and some of those motions; so every two hours the people rotate in that room. And believe me, every two hours is not always really easy to rotate people, because it takes a lot of training, a lot of commitment on training to make that happen.
This is a picture of Keith on one of our sanding tables; we sand our face frames in this area. He's working on this face frame, and you can see how he's sanding it now. This is an interesting picture because this face frame is already finished. Keith said "I really feel stupid; this face frame's already finished." And he said "Here I look like I'm sanding on it." "But, I said, I don't believe those people are going to notice that it's already finished. You just keep your stocking cap on and act like you're sanding it."
This is a picture of Terry building vanities on a flat conveyor, and that's the way we used to do it. You can see the awkward position of his back and how he's bending over that area, and the improvement would be on this angled table. Now in between that flat conveyor and this angled table, we used a table for quite a while, and it lasted five years before we went to the one we're using now. It's a metal table, and the bottom part of that table is tiltable. It's adjustable, and we have these arms that hold that side in which made that job a lot easier.
Here's Norman and Joe building medicine cabinets, and we don't do that now, but I wanted you to see how we used to do those; you can see he's nailing, putting the nailer in these medicine cabinets, note the awkward position and the difference between performing that all day long as compared to the table that we now have.
That's an angled table that we assemble our medicine cabinets with, and there's some clamping arms that keep them upright. It does primarily help the bending and the reaching problems, and there's a lot of force in using the screwgun to hold those cabinets together.
This is just a picture of the way we did our hinging doors. Becky's putting hinges on a door, her back's really not at a terribly bad position, but her shoulders are uncomfortable the way she has to push down. The team identified the fact that that really ought to be on an angled table. We realized that if you tilt that door, that the hinges slide off. So that was really a challenge to us.
Somebody said "Well, why don't we put the hinges on the top?" That was a good idea, so now we do that with an angled table. That's one of our future projects, to finish that table and get it all developed.
This is a slide that I wanted to show you. We sand doors on a flat table, it's a down-draft table. It doesn't really look like her back is that awkward. By the way, Rose works like she's killing snakes, she just goes like crazy and she doesn't want to slow her productivity down a bit.
So she spends her time working on that flat table, and we say, "Well, why don't we just tilt it up?" She said, "Well, that will slow me down a little bit". I appreciate people who don't want to slow it down, but she also has to sand the edges, and if it's tilted, it would be hard to get that bottom done. So we're still working with Rose and trying to get her to develop a little bit better thought process for ergonomics and using ergonomics as a guide to help us reduce injuries. Rose has had some shoulder problems, and usually that drives what people are typically doing, or would like to do, as far as developing a plan to reduce injuries.
I want to share a couple of other things that we're doing at WoodPro. Last year we started doing behavioral analysis for each worker, and this is done by peers. I train the safety team and do the peer appraisal on them; talk to them about safety issues, you know like straining, twisting, turning, reaching, and what we're doing that is unsafe. The form is marked either safe or unsafe; and as people talk to each other and work with each other on those kind of forms, sometimes a little bit of animosity occurs. I think we're beyond that and I believe that people are interested in working safely, whether it's crossing conveyors or whatever.
We also practice job rotation; we ask the teams to set up their own schedule and sometimes we have to encourage that a little bit heavier, to do job rotation. We usually have somebody work at a job for two to four hours. We've identified work centers and how long someone can work at that job and be safe.
We utilize our workers' compensation carriers quite a bit because they have a video library and we'll share those with our employees. We zlxo use them for specific emphasis on a certain area for training.
One of the things that we've started this year is a safety bite -- I call it a safety bite, it's just a little 5 to 10 minute safety talk that I share with a safety committee; and then in these early morning stand-up meetings the safety team can go out and share that information with their team. It takes them about five or ten minutes to share that information, and they seem to really appreciate it, and that's been really, really helpful.
We still have a long way to go, and I do believe we've come down the road a long ways, and I really just appreciate so much the opportunity to be able to come here and share with you just a few things that we're doing. I know a lot of small companies can do a lot of things as well, and I appreciate your being here, and listening to me.
DR. RODGERS: Thank you, David. It's always fun to see examples of all the good things that are happening out there.
