If you have ever attended one of my SMS presentations or training courses, you know I am a huge Edward Demming fan. I started my career during the ISO 9001 era, which many call the “Quality Era.” Do you remember Ford’s slogan in the 1990s?
“Quality is #1,” and the ISO quality movement was considerably driven by automobile manufacturers such as Ford, GM, etc.
But I was lucky, as my first plant manager believed in the ISO management system and decided that was exactly what “safety” needed as well. So we began to transform our “safety programs” into a “management system,” adopting the very same principles of ISO quality management in the way we managed Safety, Health, and Process Safety. It did not hurt that this was 1993, one year after OSHA’s Process Safety Management standard came out. We were also getting further in our commitment to becoming an OSHA VPP STAR workplace. All these “management systems” approach to managing safety collided; it was a lot to digest as a recent OSH graduate. So Westvaco sent me off to QA/QC training to understand the QMS; believe it or not, there were NOT any SMS training courses at the time. Although PSM was a hot topic, even those courses did NOT teach process safety management as a “management system” approach to managing process hazards. Yes, the name is in the title of the standard, but the SMS philosophies were just not part of these training courses. However, after my ISO training courses, I began to recognize the 14 elements of PSM (1910.119) were indeed an SMS for managing chemical processing risks and that the same approach was needed for Occupational Safety & Health (OSH) as well, and that is where our VPP journey was a game changer for me.
But here is Deming’s 14 Points on Quality Management. We coverted these to our 14 points of SMS, as well as the 14 elements of our PSMS. I think you will see the similarities of how these 14 bullet statements play a dramatic role in building an SMS.”
