Situation: Building a safety culture without data led to blindspots

Carlex is a top-tier automotive glass manufacturer and distributor. They have four manufacturing plants, one distribution center, and over 1,400 employees. Every day, they process hundreds of tons of glass in every form from raw materials to finished products. Carlex’s commitment to excellence extends from their products to their workplace safety record.

The company recently decided to strengthen their safety culture with a focus on proactive behavioral based training. They soon realized in order to do that, they would need more data. Identifying leading indicators of incidents at their plants would require far more frequent floor observation than they had the capacity to complete.

On top of that, many company leaders were new to Carlex, and needed a system to provide objective data that allowed a clearer understanding, direction, and alignment with risk reduction activities. New management and their lack of data/floor visibility made it hard to know where to focus their safety culture initiative. 

Solution: Greater Visibility and Team buy-in with Voxel

Carlex piloted Voxel’s site intelligence platform in their Vonore, Tennessee manufacturing plant. They integrated Voxel’s Computer Vision AI in 12 of their preexisting cameras. Management collaborated with the United Auto Workers (UAW) Union to ensure Voxel’s technology was non-punitive and used only for information gathering and training. Voxel’s dashboard quickly helped identify opportunities to enhance safety-specific programs, including forklift safety and PPE compliance.

Leadership at the Vonore plant was previously aware that no-stops were an issue, but they needed specific data on where to prioritize addressing this issue. Through Voxel’s 24-hour visibility and dashboard data, they quickly found the intersections and doors to target with stop signs.

Voxel also uncovered another dangerous forklift trend; forklifts and pedestrians were in close proximity at times, leading to several near-miss alerts. Leadership at Carlex addressed this by redirecting traffic and creating more demarcated pedestrian walkways throughout the Vonore plant.

Management was also surprised by a PPE trend that Voxel caught. High visibility safety vest non-compliance turned out to be much more pervasive than previously known, particularly during the time periods around shift change and break. Armed with this knowledge, management was able to emphasize the importance of safety vests during meetings, via postings and bulletins, and in training sessions and make sure the purpose and expectations of all team members were well understood. 
 

Success: Dramatic Improvements and Enthusiastic Team Buy-In

In less than three months, Carlex made significant gains in workplace safety metrics while reinforcing their safety culture, gaining team buy-in, and understanding where to focus their efforts next.

By the numbers, Voxel helped Carlex:

• Increase safety vest compliance by 86%
• Reduce no-stop incidents at end of aisles by 47%
• Reduce no-stop incidents at doors by 37%

From a culture perspective, Carlex has achieved team buy-in, and reinforced management's credibility when adjusting training programs, emphasizing improvement areas, and changing standard operating procedures (SOPs). Carlex’s management team is transparent with Voxel data, and successfully uses data to justify changes. They also use footage from the dashboard to provide examples of both exemplary and improvable behavior.

At regularly held town halls, employees ask unprompted about the Voxel data and cheer when their numbers show improvements. Managers use Voxel footage to have one-on-one chats with employees to coach them to use safer practices, and employees are receptive because they know these are non-punitive, constructive conversations.

The safety team can also plan their next priority as they solve issues, and Voxel’s data shows them other areas of improvement they can target.

Carlex’s Vonore plant has been live for 6 months but made most of this progress in under three months. That is a huge credit to the plant’s leadership and workers. They used Voxel’s data to create a safer workplace and a positive safety culture. Soon, Carlex will be doing the same in the rest of their plants. At the time of publishing this case study, they are preparing to install Voxel’s site intelligence platform in the rest of their facilities nationwide.