With forty years of experience, The Lawson Group has had the opportunity to work with companies of all sizes and industries, though the majority have been in the category of manufacturing and industry. As a result, we’ve developed a comprehensive approach to ensuring the safety and wellbeing of all stakeholders on-site.
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In the last 40 years that we’ve been doing this, we’ve we’ve had well over 5000 customers that we’ve actually worked for. And I would say probably the majority of them fit into the category of manufacturing and industry.
When I got out of graduate school, I had rarely been in a manufacturing plant at all but I’m fascinated by how things get made.
In my early days, the first thing I would do when I walked into a plant was to say, “Let me walk through the material flow.”
I would start at the loading docks and follow it through till the product goes out the other door. If I can actually understand what machinery, equipment, and processes you news you use then I can better apply my skill set to it.
I got to the point where I actually enjoyed that, and I can follow processes and I understand how things are made. And I think that has a real contribution when we sit there and do the safety and health work that we do to be able to understand how equipment and machinery runs to make recommendations that the typical safety people make so that you hamper the ability for the machine to even run and do what it’s got to do is what we run into all the time.
We had somebody else come in and look at it, and they told us we had to do this, that or the other thing. And if we do that, we can’t even use the machine. So we’re out of business. And so we have a knowledge of that. We have an appreciation for that. And I always say that if we can’t find a way to make the machine work as well or better through guarding it or changing the machine or changing the process, you’re probably not going to do it.
We’ve got a pretty good history of being able to work with companies to modify the process or make suggestions for other types of equipment or machinery that they could use that actually enhances the workflow, increases the productivity, increases the qualitative quality while at the same time providing a better safety environment for the employees. Because if you can’t make all those things work together, it’s just not going to work.
You have to include the employee in that discussion. You have to include the maintenance and equipment, people in that discussion, and you certainly have to include the managers in that discussion because it has to satisfy all those different needs or it’s not going to stay in place.
It’s not everything at the cost of safety because in most cases, if you do that, it won’t stay fixed, it won’t stay in place. We’ve had companies that go in and go through an extensive gardening program where they go through and have somebody do a machine gardening evaluation.
They have a mechanical contractor come through and build and install guards on everything, and within days the guards start to disappear because they never bothered to talk to anybody that has to use those guards. And once you start to talk to the mill rights and the maintenance guys and the machinists and the setup people and realize that they don’t have the time to pull three or four bolts out of a out of a guard three or four times a day just to get in behind that guard to do what they’ve got to do.
The guards are going to come off and it’s going to stay off, and you can take that example and run that through a hundred different examples of personal protective equipment, operation of forklifts and everything else. If you don’t come up with a plan that allows everybody to use the things that you’re putting in place to solve problems in the same manner as they were using before.
The chances are pretty good that it’s not going to work, and this is something that we’ve accumulated a vast ability of knowledge over the last 40 years that helps us be able to come up with very practical recommendations to help you folks solve these problems, and we’re happy to talk to you about it.
