NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Presentation by Tom W. Jacob, Corporate Industrial Safety Manager, Frito-Lay
DR. RODGERS: Our next speaker will be Tom Jacob who is a corporate industrial safety manager at Frito-Lay. I think there are free samples in the back.
Mr. Jacob is responsible for leading the safety and industrial hygiene improvements throughout the operations group at Frito-Lay. Prior to joining them, he worked for Texas Instruments for 14 years in a variety of safety, industrial hygiene and environmental positions at the plant, at the division, and at the corporate level.
Mr. Jacob is a graduate of Oklahoma State University, a certified safety professional, Past President of the Dallas Chapter of the American Society of Safety Engineers. He has received chapter and regional ASSE Safety Professional of the Year Awards in 1996. He also serves as a member of the Occupational Safety and Health Advisory Committee for Texas State College in Marshall, Texas.
MR. JACOB: Thank you, Suzanne. I am pleased to be here with you and share some of the learnings that we have had at Frito-Lay over the last several years. I have been there just a little over three years, and I think we have had some great successes.
What I am going to cover are the things that you see here on the chart. I am going to go through this fairly quickly, but certainly will be available to talk about anything later on.
First of all, about the Frito-Lay environment, just to give you some idea who we are. You probably know, but we are a member of the PepsiCo family, although Frito-Lay on its own acts as a whole subsidiary. We don't have a lot of corporate direction from PepsiCo. And even Frito-Lay itself is a very decentralized sort of structure. So all the locations do have a lot of autonomy, do their own things.
Annual sales of about $6 billion with 40 manufacturing sites across the U.S. I know you are going to see a variety of the product lines and some of those that we make. There are over 100 product lines that we do make in these manufacturing facilities in a variety of bag sizes from the small ones that you are going to get at Subway for your sandwich, to the larger bags that you are going to get at the discount stores for larger home applications.
And obviously to be able to serve our customers and serve the public, we have to produce a lot of product. And that is producing 30,000 bags a minute across the United States. And during the course of my presentation here of 15 to 20 minutes, our plants will be churning out somewhere in the neighborhood of 600,000 bags.
When you are talking about that sort of volume, and understanding that most of this product is fragile, nobody likes to open up a bag and find their potato chips all crushed up. Unfortunately, many current practices require those bags to be placed into boxes and cartons by hand. So 600,000 bags a minute, we are going to pack here in the next 20 minutes, and many of those are going to be placed into boxes -- the majority of those, although we have new technology -- by hand. The potato chips aren't heavy, weight is not the issue. Repetition is the issue. So we certainly had to go look at things like that.
I'd like to give you some further idea of our environment. We are going to break it down into four sections. First of all, the processing area. Processing is where the cooking is done. From an ergonomic standpoint, there's not a lot of issues there. There's only a few people that work in the processing area.
The second area is packaging. The finished product moves to the packaging room where it goes through the bagmakers and then is placed into the individual boxes. There are a lot of hand manipulations. An area of intense ergonomic efforts on our part.
Next, warehouse and shipping. Palletizing of product is done here. Some of it is done automatically, but we do a lot of picking operations to put together the specific distribution center orders, to go to our distribution centers or to our small bin locations.
And finally we have route sales, all the folks you see up and down the street in the Frito-Lay step-vans that are going into environments that we typically don't directly control. Placing product on shelves that may be seven feet high to three inches off the floor. And obviously there is a lot of potential ergonomic risk for these people as they go and make their sales routes day in and day out.
What I am going to be focusing on primarily is the packaging and warehousing and shipping area in our manufacturing environment.
We have taken ergonomics and we have made it a local initiative. It is not one that is driven from a headquarters standpoint. We work with the individual locations in a consulting role to get them to set up their own ergonomics teams at their individual locations.
Our leadership team, the management for the individual location, establishes an ergonomic steering committee that is made up of management as well as our resources as well as our technicians, our line people, to try to get a cross-section of employees to go work on these sort of initiatives and decide for the year what are our priorities going to be, what things do we need to work on, looking at historical data from the OSHA logs and workers' compensation.
There is typically an ergonomics coordinator for the location, most likely is our safety individual at that site. And we provide resources from headquarters as well as division from a consulting role. Not only in the process but also some from a specific task evaluation. We do use some outside ergonomics consultants particularly for new equipment designs. When we're looking at new packaging operations, when we're looking at new warehousing designs we bring in some experts with a fresh set of eyes that can help us try to design these things to minimize our ergonomic issues.
The steering committee then can set up, and we encourage them to do this, to set up smaller teams, like one for processing. There are processing issues, since they understand that role. One for packaging, maybe one for warehouse. So when you come into one of our locations you are going to find that we may have several ergonomic teams working on the issues. And they are going out and doing their own cursory sort of task analysis. We provide these teams with training to be able to do that.
Our ergonomic strategy is really our foundation for the improvement in all of our manufacturing locations. And at the left there you see the things we are doing around training and administration. We also encourage people to report issues early. And that is something we probably didn't do well earlier. Not that we encourage people to work through it, but we didn't get them to come to us earlier. Now when they come to us early, we can get something done about it.
New employee ramp-ins. You are going to be on the packaging line working eight hours a day. You don't just throw yourself out there and expect them to get up to speed with the packaging lines. So we have a couple of weeks for them to, if you will, climatize to the environment and make sure that they are getting adjusted to the speeds, to the repetitions and things like that.
Packer training and P.I.E. I am not talking about cakes here. I am talking about a program that we have that is called People Improving Ergonomics. That is a technician-based team that goes out and evaluates other technicians doing the job. They go videotape them. And if they find that they are varying from what the standards are for this sort of job, they pull them in, show them the videotape and say, "Look, if you do it this way, the way we prescribe, you are going to have less risk. You are adding additional movement and things like that." So that one-on-one sort of peer technician feedback has really been important and really given us some good successes.
Job rotations, trying to get people to work on different operations, relieving some muscle strains and strains on different parts. And then overtime management. We found that overtime certainly has a big impact on whether or not we have had ergonomic-related issues. We have gotten a little smarter about managing that overtime.
The medical management piece, from an earlier intervention, getting people to come to us earlier. We have occupational and/or physical therapists in most of our locations now who can provide that immediate sort of place for them to go. OTs and the PTs also help us in doing task analysis. We expect them to spend a lot of time out on the floor. They are not office-based. They are supposed to be out on the floor, working with people, looking at jobs, working with their teams, doing the analysis.
We are very interested in return to work, getting people back to work as quickly as possible in some modified duty, if that is possible. And then once they do come back, if they need some work -- just like climatizing them to begin with is trying to get them back to up speed maybe post-injury.
But obviously the real important thing we want to be doing is working on engineering controls. And we have a lot of things going on in our packaging technology to try to assist the packers in doing their jobs and giving them some aids, giving some additional automation to that sort of process, the warehouse designs and how we are picking operations and the anthropometrics around picking different conveyor heights. And as well as trailer loading. We load a lot of trailers by hand, and now we have gone to some assisted devices which help load those.
So, have we been able to do this and have we been able to make an impact? Our process there that I have gone through very quickly, I think we have. Let's take a look at a couple of our locations. The Georgia facility, their rate of CTDs over a three-year period is down in manufacturing operations, the packaging and the processing part. It is down 73 percent. It puts a focus on it, puts some effort to it. Yes, we have invested headquarters money to try to get new equipment and technologies. In the warehouse, down 83 percent, and their overall plant workers' compensation cost per claim is down 24 percent over a 3-year period. Made some great strides in there.
In California, we have had another facility that over a 2-year period of time now has reduced their CTDs in the processing packaging area by 55 percent. And, additionally, in line with that, they also reduced their work comp costs.
Those are just a couple of facilities. But if you go look at nationally what we have been able to do, our 40 locations all involved on the CTDs and the ergonomic-related issues is our claims have remained relatively flat. They went down just a tick last year in '95, but they came back up in '96. But the overall cost, the overall cost incurred for these sort of injuries has gone down 35 percent and the cost per claim has gone down as well. So we feel real good. This is helping us to be able to invest in some things, to be able to show a return to our management that the things we are doing are helping them get better at what we are doing and making some more money.
I want to share with you now just some things that I have learned in working Frito-Lay, as well as my previous employer. If you all are out working on some ergonomics programs, maybe some keys we have seen to success. The first one probably everybody thinks about is the management support and involvement. Obviously, they are the ones that fund our ergonomic future, if you will. We have to be able to show a payback for these sorts of things, I think, to be realistic, in order for them to sign up for these things rather willingly. And, also, we want them to be very visible cheerleaders and if we hit a win, making sure that they are out there supporting us and are communicating that to everybody else.
The participative program. We want a very team-involved sort of ergonomic process that supports us. We are a team-oriented location, so we have to have all levels of the organization participating in that. And they run their own business, the teams do, and we expect them to work on the ergonomic issues as well, and we think that has been a big win for us.
We have to have a sustained and focused strategy. Each one of our locations are required to put together a safety action plan every year, what they are going to work on. Part of that has to be spelled out as to what kind of ergonomics and issues that they are going to work on for the coming year, what about training, what about interventions. So you have to make sure that you are heading in the right direction and you stay focused on where you are trying to go.
And like was talked this morning, we have to promote the success stories. You get those wins. Boy, if I ever get a ergonomic solution where I can show some productivity gains as well, they will never get me to shut up. Because I keep throwing that back at them, that those sorts of things have had that productivity benefit as well. So if you get those, make sure that you are a success in promoting those around.
Well, everything is not a success story. There are some pitfalls to avoid, and make sure if you are getting into this -- I think these are some that we have learned from. First of all, obviously, is don't rely exclusively on consultants. I think you have to develop some in-house expertise. Now, we don't do everything in-house, we still do some work with consultants. But, nevertheless, a lot of the local sort of activities, there's a lot of job analysis you can do at your locations of cursory sort of stuff and that teams and people will be glad to do. They would like to have an opportunity to learn more about what ergonomics is and how to go off and do those sorts of things.
Don't attempt to do too much at once. And you can quickly get overwhelmed by the amount of work. If you go out to everybody and say, "Bring all your ergonomic solutions to us and we are going to fix them," and suddenly you have been inundated. And in short time, your program that you thought was going to be a positive turns out to be a real negative because now people's concerns are not getting addressed. So you have to watch out that you don't bite off more than you can chew originally with what resources that you have.
Don't unreasonably raise the expectations of your customer. "We will have all this fixed next week." It's not going to happen. This will take care of the problem and we won't have any more injuries. Not going to happen. You have to make sure that management understands that we are probably going to minimize our risks. We are going to get some benefits out of it and there may still be some risks there.
Also, you are rolling out a new ergonomics program to a plant that the trend, as we saw this morning in one of the charts, show that the number of claims or number of injuries actually went up, because you are getting people to report things early, you want them to come to you. But you have to look at your other data to show that things are going down.
Don't think that every problem requires extensive engineering controls, because they don't. The old kiss principle, keep it simple, stupid, works. And there's a lot of low cost, low technology solutions that can be put into place in your locations as well as ours that will minimize or eliminate these potential ergonomic issues.
Don't insist on 100-percent elimination of the problem. I think that is clearly unreasonable. As long as we have people in the work environment, risk is going to be there. We look at trying to minimize those things, we look at trying to cut the hazards down. And our job analysis that we are going to do should show that a rating now has gone from a job rating of 90 to now 60 or something like that. So you are making progress and minimizing the risk. Prioritize what you are going to work on and make some impact on that in the work and move on to the next one.
And, finally, what are we getting out of it. And, again, this was brought up this morning. This does give you a competitive advantage. And we believe it is going to give us a competitive advantage. It is going to be a safer work environment. That's good for everybody. That is good for our employees, that is good for everybody.
Enhanced employee morale. They now understand that we are interested in helping them. We are interested in making their work life easier. You don't have to come here and go home aching in pain.
And, last of all, we do get some productivity boosts about it and, let's face it, that's what the management likes. They like to see productivity increase as well. All those things coupled up obviously give us a heck of a lot better work environment and give us a competitive advantage.
I appreciate the time I have had with you, and I will be around later on if anybody has any questions.
THIS PAGE WAS LAST UPDATED ON JULY 28, 1997
