Assessment of the Impact of Lean Tools on the Safety of the Shoemaking Industry

Both the Lean philosophy and occupational safety and health have been widely studied, although this has usually been carried out independently. However, the correlation between Lean and occupational safety and health in the industrial context is still underexplored. Indeed, Lean tools can be applied to ensure the best safety environment for workers in each kind of manufacturing process, and this deserves to be studied. The study described here aims to understand the influence of each of a set of four Lean tools used in an industrial context with a strong manual labor component, seeking to determine the influence of each of these Lean tools on the increase in safety obtained through their application. For this purpose, four Lean tools that are quite commonly applied are selected, taking into account previously presented work that pointed to the positive influence of the application of each of these tools on worker safety: total productive maintenance system, Gemba walk, visual management and Yokoten. This study aims to apply these Lean tools and to analyze their impact on productivity, and then, on the safety of a company selected as a target in order to validate the concept. For this purpose, a new tool is created. In the first instance, the tool analyzes the current state of the productive process and the safety level through the study of the risk levels detected in the plant. In terms of productivity results, a reduction between 7% and 12% in cycle time is achieved in four areas of the plant. The feedback from employees showed increased satisfaction with the processes’ simplification. To conclude, a 50% reduction in the number of work accidents per month is observed as a result of the implementation of Lean tools. The influence of the selected Lean tools on increasing both productivity and safety is clear, and our results prove the selection of tools to be largely adequate.