VPP, God and Pull

8/27/14…Over the last few years, our plant is considering pursuing a Virginia VPP certification in safety. We believe using this process may change our plant culture, ultimately driving reduction in injuries. However, like other third party auditing such as SQF, ISO, etc., there are wastes in this process. Typically auditors, at times, take certain elements to extremes, which may bring no value into the system and increases costs. VPP is a great example of this. We are hearing from other companies, that although VPP helps drive safety culture improvement, the downside is the process drives up costs and ties up significant resources within a company.

What I find interesting about VPP is the approach. Virginia’s OSHA agency created this program. A significant part of their customer base is manufacturers. Their challenge is how, under limited people resources, do we enforce compliance within the state of Virginia? In part, the way they answered this question was creating a gap analysis to communicate the elements, required mentorship by fellow industry members and most importantly a prestigious certification and award. The approach, with the marketing and branding, is genius. Their customers, including our plant, are using their resources, energy and passion to go after this prestigious certification and even mentor other manufacturers. OSHA added no resources. From a lean perspective, they created a pull versus a push system.

  

I have also seen this experience within our company. Our global group created a Lean Assessment to communicate and convey how far each plant is on their Lean journey. By creating this and attaching an award along with the prestige, they created a pull system, whereby some, but not all of our plants worldwide are going after this award. In essence, this is also a pull system because plants are asking for knowledge, help, etc. from the global group versus the global group pushing compliance.

With these examples, I also wonder where else can a pull versus push system succeed. Leadership generally pushes down. Instead, how do we create pull with initiatives? Most training programs I am involved in are push. After the training, most people do not apply the knowledge or soon forget. 

In looking at this from the TOIL perspective, I find God’s approach is pull. In the Bible, He conveys to me, the closer I am to Him, the closer He is to me.

Indeed…a pull system.