Making up for lost time
Since Honeywell Safety Products acquired Sperian just over three years ago the PPE giant has been relatively quiet. Honeywell Safety Products’ Sach Sankpal says that’s because they’ve been busy finding out exactly what their customers want and tailoring their offering accordingly. Georgina Bisby met up with Sach at this year’s A+A Exhibition where he explained that what the average time-poor safety manager really wants is some time back on their calendar.
“What became very clear from the Voice of the Customer (VOC) engagements we undertook following the acquisition of Honeywell is that nobody wants us to be another products company. People are looking for solutions.”
“Health Safety & Environment (HSE) managers today are struggling. Budgets are not increasing, and in many instances they are decreasing, so the average HSE manager has to do more with less. They’re not getting any more head count but the number and level of regulations is increasing while the level of accidents and incidents are not reducing as fast as people would like, and they have to manage all of this complexity.” says Sach Sankpal, Honeywell Safety Products EMEAI vice president and general manager.
In response to customer demand for a more solutions focused approach and with the time constraints faced by HSE managers in mind, Honeywell has devised a total solutions offering based on four key pillars: Leadership, Equipment, Education and Analysis.
The approach focuses on reducing the complexity of the HSE managers job in order to free up their time to help them build a culture of safety, a process which Honeywell wants to be an integral part of.
“What we have heard repeatedly from HSE managers is that if they look at all of the time they spend, they’re not spending enough on preventative measures and leading their teams to safety. Reporting, compliance run processes, trouble shooting and dealing with existing incidents dominate working hours leaving only a small slice of time to dedicate to preventative issues and working with team members to get safety embedded into the organisation.”
“So what we undertook a few years ago, which we believe we’re the only industry player to do, is to standardise on PPE throughout the world for our products. We went from tens of thousands of skews to probably 500 so the level of complexity to manage the number of skews has gone down and we have created simplicity for HSE managers giving them time back on their calendars to focus on prevention.”
Equipping the workforce for safety
Another piece of critical feedback that the VOC engagements raised was that HSE managers are feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of choice when it comes to PPE. As this year’s A+A exhibition was testament to, there is an ever growing and increasingly sophisticated range of PPE on the market but this doesn’t necessarily equate to better protection.
“HSE managers open a product catalogue and there’s literally thousands of products so the prospect of matching a hazard with a vertical market with the regulations with the PPE can be daunting, not to mention time-consuming. More and more we are being asked – can you help me design a suite of products that solves these particular hazards that lowers the amount of safety incidents? We will walk the site and then sit down with the customers and develop charts of where we find their most critical issues so that we can provide a set of products which will eliminate or minimise those specific hazards,” explains Sach.
Education, education, education
For Honeywell, behaviour-based safety education and training are key elements in building a culture where workers make safer choices for themselves. “Products are getting more technical because regulations and hazards are increasing, for example more volatile gases are being identified, so what many customers are looking for is information on how to best use products and how to inspect them so we have a team dedicated to providing this.” Honeywell Safety Products’ workplace safety training and services encompass a wide variety of topics such as safety management, proper usage, hazard prevention, regulatory compliance, and equipment repair and maintenance.
Analysis
Honeywell Safety Products is also keen to help HSE managers evaluate their safety equipment usage and performance and says it believes it is the first in its field to incorporate analytic and diagnostic technologies that monitor and collect data within its PPE. Through tracking, analysis, and feedback, Sach suggests HSE mangers can identify the factors that impact safety product use and performance, allowing them to spend more time on leadership and less time on enforcement.
“It’s interesting how much data you can get if you embed PPE with sensors ,” says Sach. “We are asked, can you help me manage my PPE and inspections and can you get me data around exposures so I can then take preventative actions? Take Hearing Protection, for example, many of the hearing solutions available today monitor the number of decibels people are exposed to but it is possible to monitor much more than this and we believe people are going to increasingly want and need to. Hearing protection is likely to be an area that is more heavily regulated in the future and some of the companies we are working with now who are using our advanced technologies are on the leading edge of understanding this,” suggests Sach.
I get the sense that Honeywell Safety Products has only just begun when it comes to incorporating analytical technology into its PPE and Sach confirms that pulling other Honeywell technologies and embedding them into their PPE is an important part of their road map.
