American Standard Case Study

Ergonomics Management System Drives Accelerated Improvement

At the close of 2006, American Standard was an $11 billion dollar global enterprise with more than 62,000 employees and three market-leading businesses: Air Conditioning Systems and Services, Bath and Kitchen Products, and Vehicle Control Systems.*. It is organized into three market-leading businesses: Air Conditioning Systems and Services, Bath andKitchen Products, and Vehicle Control Systems.

Humantech assisted American Standard in reducing ergonomic risk in all sectors worldwide. As a result, figures for the recordable incident rate and the lost workday case rate were reduced by 50% in
just four years, cutting ergonomics-related incidents from 70% to 20% of total injuries. This represents an 86% reduction in ergonomics-related recordable incident rate.

* In 2007, American Standard separated its three businesses by selling its Bath and Kitchen business and spinning off its Vehicle Control Systems business. As of November 2007, the company is now known as Trane and focuses on Air Conditioning Systems and Services with annual revenues of about $7 billion and 29,000 employees.

The Challenge

American Standard embarked on an ambitious health and safety improvement initiative beginning in 2000. With no corporate health and safety function at that time, sites faced issues on a reactive and uncoordinated basis. Enterprise-wide, the recordable incident rate was approaching 10 and the lost workday case rate exceeded 3.5. Cathy Hansell, Corporate Health and Safety Vice President, led the effort to build the infrastructure for world-class safety performance, with the goal of achieving a global recordable incident rate of 0.7 and a lost workday case rate of 0.07 within seven years.

Some of the early steps taken between 2000 and 2003 included adding health and safety staff at all levels of the organization (corporate, regions, and plants), establishing line ownership and accountability, creating a dashboard of health and safety leading and lagging metrics for review by business leaders, and rolling out health and safety procedures and training globally. In just the first four years, the company’s global recordable incident rate had dropped by 72% and the global lost workday case rate had dropped by 79%.

The pace of improvement was impressive, but American Standard realized that it would not be able to reach its goal of world-class health and safety performance without a focused ergonomics process. The company partnered with Humantech to deploy a four-stage ergonomic improvement initiative with the goal of zero jobs with high ergonomic risk.

The Solution

With ambitious goals for improving injury rates and a complex corporate structure (four businesses, each operating globally), a staged deployment for ergonomics was necessary. American Standard decided to deploy the ergonomics process in four phases.

Phase 1: The Manufacturing Sector

After several demonstration projects to fine-tune the process in representative facilities, American Standard designated a team of Ergonomics Process Owners. These individuals were selected from the engineering community from each facility worldwide. They met during a series of six workshops led by Humantech to learn the steps required to implement an effective ergonomic improvement process, including assessing for ergonomic risks, improving high risk jobs, and training employees in ergonomics awareness.

Understanding the effort needed to achieve a workplace with zero high ergonomic risk jobs, American Standard committed totraining all engineers and health and safety staff in Humantech’s Applied Ergonomics and Ergonomic Design Guidelines for Engineers courses. Between 2003 and 2005, Humantech trained over 500 engineers on these topics. American Standard has since internalized the training delivery.

Phase 2: Field Services

American Standard’s Trane division maintains a global staff of 4,000 technicians who were routinely exposed to ergonomic risk while installing and servicing commercial air conditioners at client locations. Humantech assisted American Standard with cataloging common ergonomic challenges related to work in the field, identifying tools and equipment to reduce exposure to ergonomic hazards, and developing an ergonomics training program focusing on the common ergonomic challenges and approaches that technicians can take to minimize the possibility of injury. The training program was deployed through a train-the-trainer initiative involving field office managers and safety coordinators.

Phase 3: New Product Introduction

American Standard follows a systematic process for developing and deploying new products. To ensure that new products were designed for easy assembly and servicing, a series of ergonomics checks were built into the existing gate reviews. Humantech assisted with training product designers, and American Standard has internalized the training delivery.

Phase 4: Office Ergonomics

Enterprise-wide, the company found that it needed to support 22 different languages to reach all office workers. Consequently, the rollout of online ergonomics self-assessments (using Humantech’s ergoTool™ software) and training of local resident experts in office ergonomics required careful planning and preparation. In 2006, all American Standard office employees completed ergonomics self-assessments and ergonomics awareness training.

The Results

American Standard continues to drive its recordable incident and lost workday case rates down globally. Since the ergonomics initiative was deployed in 2003, the company is on track to achieve world-class rates in safety by the end of 2008, realizing an 86% reduction in ergonomically-related injury rates in just four years. Just as important, all locations are striving to achieve zero jobs with high ergonomic risk, and are expected to do so by the end of 2009.