Nypro enthusiastically participates in SPI's Safety Statistics and Awards Program and is proud to have 10 of its U.S. manufacturing sites recognized for above-average safety for 2012.
The SSA is an outgrowth of SPI's EHS+, a group working to advance environment, health, safety and regu¬latory issues. SSA was created to gather information on industry safety and to recognize facilities that have achieved a high level of safety performance. Awards are based on data reported on a company's annual OSHA 300 Log of Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses.
At Nypro, we believe people are our most valuable asset, and their safety is paramount. We pride ourselves on our commitment to safety and consistently outperforming the industry average for workplace injury rates. To provide substantial facilitywide improvements, we've worked hard over the past four years to develop and implement the Safety Ascension Improvement Model (AIM), a multiyear model that drives toward a culture of continuous improvement where sites "ascend" to a higher level of safety as they implement core elements of a world-class safety program.
The most basic requirements of AIM include implementation of safety committees; incident and root- cause analysis; hazard analysis; development of a robust training program; and implementation of a formal reward and recognition program.
The SPI SSA program provides Nypro sites a mechanism that helps to meet these requirements by participating in the program.
The annual awards also serve as a thank you to our employees for their hard work
and dedicated focus on safety. The awards are posted on Nypro's internal EHS portal, and award-winning sites are recognized by our EHS board of directors.
The safety awards help us demonstrate to employees that their personal contribution to our safety program is highly valued not only internally, but externally as well. Receiving an SPI Safety Award is a reflection of their personal commitment to workplace health and safety, and by celebrating those successes, allows us to reinforce the value we place on our employees.
Participating in the program also has the added benefit of providing sites visibility into how they performed relative to other U.S. companies in similar industries. This industry-specific feedback related to injury-rate trends would be otherwise unavailable if Nypro did not participate in SPI's SSA program.
For Nypro as a whole, having the opportunity to participate in the program and having our sites recognized as award recipients gives us a sense of great accomplishment. We are proud of our growing success and are pleased to serve as a good example for other companies within the plastics industry. With the program's support, Nypro continues to strive for world-class safety through the application of our AIM program. Our No. 1 goal is to always provide our employees with a work environment in which they know safety is a top priority.
Lesso is senior director of corporate environmental, health, safety and sustainability for Nypro Inc. of Clinton, Mass.
