We would like to begin this article by asking you to examine this photo of the Safway crew at the Valero Benicia Refinery. To us, this photo captures what Safway is all about. Here we see evidence of pride, responsibility, integrity and dedication. This is the heart of who we are at Safway.
Now please take a few minutes to look at each one of these Safway team members. All members of this crew, along with all of our employees, have their own stories, their own families and friends, and their own lives to lead. This underscores the importance of keeping every individual who works with us safe. Safway has over 10,000 employees across 95 locations in the U.S. and Canada, and our employees face challenging conditions at countless jobsites every day. It is our first and foremost responsibility to keep them safe.
Think different
To help improve safe work practices, Safway® Group participated with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Center for Construction Research and Training (CPWR) on an industry-wide initiative in 2013 and 2014. Major general contractors; engineering firms; owners of refinery, power and petrochemical plants; representatives from prominent universities; and leaders of organized labor were represented on the OSHA/NIOSH/CPWR panel. Safway was the only access and industrial service player on this panel.
There were many important subjects raised, and the requisite issue regarding the need to strike the right balance of behavioral-based safety along with comprehensive safety processes and procedures was widely discussed. However, as we challenged ourselves to think outside the box regarding safety in our industry, two key issues were determined to be essential to improving safety:
1. The need to recognize and address the many subcultures of safety present on each jobsite. This means we must ensure our front-line leaders at each site are extolling the same values and establishing the optimum safety culture at each individual jobsite. For Safway, this means selecting, training, developing and retaining the best supervisors, foremen and project managers will continue to be a critical priority moving forward.
2. The importance of measuring ourselves on leading indicators of safety. Our entire industry measures itself on Total Recordable Incident Rates (TRIR), which are clearly lagging indicators of safety and not a predictor of future performance. Our panel of industry representatives — together with OSHA/NIOSH and CPWR — debated and finally decided on the key determinants of future safety results. We also worked together to draft a list of issues to help determine if we’re really doing the right things to protect our people, along with suggestions on ways to improve if we are falling short. See sidebar for a partial list of leading indicators on next page.
At Safway, like your company, safety is and always will be our No. 1 value. To help our entire industry raise safety levels, we want to be a thought leader in safety, and we are committed to continuously improving our HS&E performance. So while we frequently receive recognition — such as Merit Safety Awards from American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) and 1 million hours without a recordable incident at our Phillips 66 Alliance Refinery in Belle Chasse, Louisiana — and saw a significant reduction in TRIR this past year, we are committed to raising the bar even higher. Over the past year, we added several new and exciting safety programs. Additional safety policies and procedures that were implemented included the establishment of STOP Work, STOP Falls Campaigns and 10 Life-Saving Rules.
More locations, local labor
Beyond our overall continuing improvement in our safety, there are a lot of other great things going on at Safway as we challenge ourselves to think different and continuously improve our performance every day. We added several new high-performing multiservice locations in 2014 to provide local expertise and inventory. These include Redi Solutions in Lexington, Kentucky, which provides service to businesses across the Ohio River Valley; a Safway branch with a blast yard in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and the acquisition of Nel-Tekk, a branch in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, that is able to offer a range of insulation-related services, asbestos, mold and lead abatement, identification surveys, inspections and fireproofing, firestopping and smoke-sealing systems.
Bottom line: Now with 95 locations and over 10,000 employees, wherever our customers are located across North America, there is a Safway Group branch or company nearby ready to serve you with local labor and easily accessible inventory.
Focus on performance, not just price
Over the past two years, we have also implemented and fine-tuned the way we serve customers to improve our performance, and we are off to an outstanding 2015 — our best ever.
Our ability to offer customers flexible contract options, including Work Activity Norms or unit-based pricing and performance contracts, in addition to time and materials or lump sum estimates, has been key to helping us provide a higher level of service. These contract options mean we are able to work with whatever billing and/or budget parameters a customer may require. It also means we’re prepared to share in the risk with our customers to keep down costs and increase the profitability of any project. We’re changing our mindset regarding productivity, cost per hour and cost per unit. We know good performance includes much more than price.
We are constantly and proactively reviewing our performance, so we can set progressive norms to improve productivity and safety, while saving time and money overall. As a result, we are considering alternative and new cost-saving products and services, such as:
- Pre-planned scaffold builds.
- Off-site insulation fabrication.
- Proprietary blast media, which eliminates disposal costs.
- Mobile, modular scaffold trailers and trucks.
- Strategically placed on-site yards.
- Work-group packages for SIP (scaffold, insulation and painting) to enhance multicraft delivery.
- QuikDeck® Suspended Access System, instead of a full-scaffold buildup.
- Key performance indicators, not only for labor but also for mix and utilization of equipment.
This kind of approach also requires we carefully examine nonwrench logistics. This includes:
- Using certified crews for rope access, which could easily lead to savings of $40,000 per vessel.
- Reviewing and analyzing the specs for insulation, fireproofing and coatings to improve asset life and decrease required maintenance.
- Scheduling shifts creatively to compensate for poor planning on the part of other trades, to reduce overtime and to allow for dedicated dismantle time.
- Improving the management of inventory and inspections.
Engineering a better solution
Safway also has an exciting story to tell when it comes to product development, research, design and engineering. In 2014, we expanded, introduced and launched several new products and services designed to increase safety while also saving time and money. In addition, as we add and expand our diverse equipment and service offerings, we continue to maintain one of the largest inventories in this industry — provided where and when you need it. New equipment and service offerings include SafScan™, HAKI® and QuikShield™.
Increasing productivity with HD laser surveying
SafScan High-Definition (HD) Laser Surveying delivers highly accurate, precise 3-D images of existing conditions at any industrial plant, offshore facility, bridge or other site. When a customer does not have up-to-date plant drawings, we can survey the facility and import the scan into our computer-aided design (CAD) program to engineer a solution based on a solid foundation of information. This can save weeks and even months of time, and eliminate interferences altogether. Of course, when a customer can provide digital images, we can import those into our engineering design programs as well.
In 2014, by using SafScan for a project at one of the largest refineries in the U.S., we were able to engineer a custom solution that included using the QuikDeck Suspended Access System. This allowed us to build a working platform 200 feet in the air around the inside perimeter of a tower, saving the customer the time and expense of a complete scaffold buildup.
Create weather barriers, cover huge areas
Safway Group is the primary distributor of HAKI products in North America. This includes HAKITEC® temporary roofs, shelters and buildings — frequently used for weather protection — and HAKISPAN, mobile and stationary access platforms to provide access over vast spaces, allow facilities to remain open and in use, and enhance safety.
This past year, when a customer had to quickly enclose a mod yard for the fabrication of a huge piece of equipment for oil sands bitumen processing in an extreme weather environment, HAKITEC offered the perfect solution. The enclosure was 70 feet wide and 130 feet long with no supporting columns obstructing the work area. A strong, flexible vinyl sheeting was stretched over the long HAKI spans to form a continuous seal enclosing the entire site.
In this instance, a key benefit of the solution was HAKI’s modular setup, which allows parts of an enclosure to be moved or removed temporarily to load in or extract large equipment parts and pieces.
The equipment, which was being fabricated, was a large processing unit and had to be built and disassembled, then shipped and re-assembled on-site. To increase productivity and work quality in the initial fabrication, especially in light of the extensive welding required, temperature control was a must.
At the same time, large pieces of 1-inch-thick steel, each weighing more than 1 ton, had to be brought in as the construction moved along. With HAKI, a section of the roof could be quickly removed during lunchtime when workers were off-site, allowing steel to be hoisted in with a crane. The open section was then replaced by the time the crew returned.
The crew foreman estimated this ability saved approximately 11,000 labor hours over the life of the project. “The HAKI system was really good, probably one of the best decisions we’ve ever made,” said the mod yard’s scaffolding crew foreman. “It’s light, it’s strong and it assembles quickly.”
The ability to remove and replace the roof section quickly enhanced worker safety and ensured no personnel would be in the area during the lift. In comparison, it would have cost thousands more to build and then remove sections for brief periods during the project using a more traditional access solution.
Introducing QuikShield
In early 2014, Safway launched a low-cost, versatile suspended access product, QuikShield, to offer customers an additional option to QuikDeck. Designed to provide a surface rigid enough to support ladders and wheeled equipment, although its deck does not have to be horizontal, QuikShield is an ideal way to deliver access along curved surfaces, such as bridge arches.
Used for the first time on the rehabilitation of the 2,135-foot Longfellow Bridge in Boston, QuikShield provided the perfect access solution. “The wooden deck provides much more traction, plus it gives us a more secure feeling,” said J.F. White’s superintendent for the Longfellow Bridge restoration project. “Stability wise and strength wise, there’s no comparison to the other systems I’ve worked on.”
Keeping energy costs down
As another service to our customers, Redi Solutions, a Safway Group company, now has National Insulation Association-certified appraisers on staff to provide energy surveys. By examining walls, ceilings, attics and insulation, and analyzing occupancy patterns, equipment usage and previous energy bills, our appraisers can put together a report that summarizes findings and provides specific recommendations — whether our customers get their energy from coal, natural gas or even off the grid. The report includes specific actions a customer can take; a budget with line-by-line costs for any recommendations; anticipated savings in operational expenses per month; and, most importantly, a date when the customer can expect to recoup the cost of any investment in insulation and energy improvements to help reduce operational expenses and increase profits.
We also have continued to add to our fleet of motorized equipment options: personnel and material hoists, and transport platforms and climbers including the SafRise Climber™, a new vertical access work platform that is setting a new industry standard for versatility, productivity and safety.
With our think-outside-the-box approach to everything from contracting and engineering to planning and execution, Safway is prepared to do much more than talk. From leading rather than lagging indicators in safety; to more locations and local labor; to performance contracts and nonwrench logistics; to research, development and engineering, Safway is committed to setting a new standard in the industry.
This article was written by Bill Hayes, president and CEO of Safway Group; Jeff Sprau, U.S. division president of Safway Services; and Steve Wilson, Canada division president of Safway Services.
For more information, visit www.safwaygroup.com or call (800) 558-4772.
