In this Feed & Grain Chat, Stuart Beckman, director of safety for Columbia Grain International (CGI), discusses CGI's recent safety initiatives, including partnering with a North Dakota workforce safety initiative, revamping their fumigation program, conducting safety assessments across their facilities, and implementing thermographic imaging for electrical hazards. Beckman highlights ongoing efforts to improve incident reporting, investigation procedures and critical safety device protocols. He also emphasizes CGI’s commitment to employee safety, especially during harvest season.
Transcript of Feed & Grain Chat with Stuart Beckman, director of Safety, Columbia Grain International
Elise Schafer, editor, Feed & Grain: Hi, everyone, and welcome to Feed & Grain Chat. I'm your host Elise Schafer, editor of Feed & Grain. This edition of Feed & Grain Chat is brought to you by WATT Global Media and FeedandGrain.com. FeedandGrain.com is your source for the latest news, product and equipment information for the grain handling and feed manufacturing industries.
Today, I'm joined on Zoom by Stuart Beckman, director of safety for Columbia Grain International. He's here to tell us about CGI’s new safety programs and give advice on cultivating a culture of safety. Hi, Stuart, thanks for joining me today.
Stuart Beckman, director of safety, Columbia Grain International: Yes, good morning. Elise, glad to be here.
Schafer: Absolutely. Stuart, can you start by telling me about the new safety program, CGI recently implemented, and any results you've gotten from employees or feedback so far?
Beckman: I'll start by saying I've only been with the company about four months, so I'm really still in the assessment phase, but in this four months, we have made some changes. We have implemented some new safety procedures or policies. One of the things we worked on in the first couple of weeks of me starting was to work with North Dakota's Workforce Safety Initiative, which is our work comp claims. And we actually went through an assessment with them, and went through all of our safety programs. We went through our safety training, and we actually took them to one of our big facilities in Jamestown, North Dakota, for a site visit so they could see our facilities, and they were very happy. We did well in this safety assessment with them. So I just say it was to start a partnership with them and really work with them, and I think it turned out very good for us. So that was kind of a highlight.
Another thing we had to work on, Elise, when I got here was our fumigation program. We realized we had some shortcomings in our fumigation program. So we completely rewrote that program to include what we call a fumigation management plan, or what we call the FMP. So, we got that rolled out with that program with a new FMP, and then we trained all of our operations leadership and our our location leadership across the country with what these new requirements are. We just wanted to make sure we're tracking with these requirements. So that was kind of [...] a lot to do. There was a lot of moving pieces to get that going.
One of the things I'd like to say is we are doing safety assessments across the nation at our locations, and we've learned some things, and I'm still learning and assessing from those assessments, but I'll maybe highlight a couple of things here in a minute around that just another initiative. I'd like to say that I think Columbia is doing a great job. We've hired a third party contractor called Pepper Maintenance to come out and do thermographic imaging for us in our electrical rooms just to look for electrical hazards. So I applaud Columbia Grain for doing that. It's great to have Pepper Maintenance out, and really it's about preventive maintenance before we have an issue. So it's being very proactive. We're eliminating hazards around that, and that's great to see.
Just a couple of things I'd like to talk about that our safety action teams have found are around some electrical things, around some falls from heights where we've needed to put in swing gates and look at some of our elevation hazards. Again, we've worked on some electrical things. So, I applaud Columbia Grain for having these safety action teams, and they're effective, as well.
Schafer: Now, can you recap the gap analysis CGI conducted on its safety programs? You mentioned one area for improvement. Are there any others that you think other companies might relate to?
Beckman: That gap analysis is ongoing, and obviously when we look at that gap analysis, we're looking to make sure we're following OSHA standards and other best practices in the industry. Really important to do that, and I found a couple that we need to work on in the upcoming year. One is in and around our incident reporting and our investigation program. A lot of grain businesses use a safety management system called RCI. We do too, and that helps us track our incidents, our corrective actions. We have our policy manual there, but the thing that I want to make sure we improve in our incident reporting program is, hey, if we have a serious incident here, how do we notify our leadership? How do we initiate the investigation? How do we put resources at our locations, meaning me or others to help with that investigation. I think we just need to define that a little more and even our drug testing program needs to be a little more well-defined. So that's something we're working on.
Columbia Grain runs a commercial fleet of vehicles because of our business, so we've got commercial drivers and vehicles, as well. There's requirements around that, so we are working on updating our our DOT and drivers program. That'll be a good thing to work on.
And in our business, it's really important that we understand our hazard controls, or what we call critical safety devices. So those are devices, and they're very common in the grain business, and really there's three of them. There's there's alignment sensors, or what we call rub blocks, there's bearing temp sensors, and there's speed sensors to make sure we don't burn a belt in half or have a condition like that. But I think we just need to tighten up our program around critical safety devices to make sure we understand what set points are, make sure our corporate standard is spread across our organization. We so need to teach our guys what to do in case that system alarms and what procedures or protocols are in place and how to troubleshoot that, figure out what went wrong and make sure we don't operate until we have that item fixed and corrective action applied.
Just want to mention one other thing at Columbia Grain, one of the things we're doing is we're training our leaders, right. So, really important in the grain business, and I like what Columbia Grain's approach is, we're doing and scheduling 10-hour OSHA courses right now for all of our operations employees across the nation. So, we're going to put them through a 10-hour OSHA course, and then we're going to go a step further, and we're going to put all of our location managers and operations managers through a 30-hour course that'll start sometime in, I believe, March of '25, so some really good things we've learned, and really some good things that we're updating at Columbia.
Schafer: So how do you encourage location leadership to take ownership of safety practices like identifying hazards, and how do you measure their success?
Beckman: Hey, we've got our safety action teams, and they do a great job, and we've talked a little bit about that, how they go around and look at different locations, recognize hazards, and it's a peer-to-peer relationship, right? So, it's operations managers from one location going to another and giving advice, different set of eyes to look for hazards, and then coming up with the corrective actions and implementing them.
Another thing we've did, though, I need to mention, is we do a monthly safety and operations call, and I think it's really important we start out that call with our top business leadership, so they get on and they give us a little business update, but they tie it to safety. And I think it's great to have those guys involved in our safety calls. They’re the leaders of this organization, and it's great to to have them in front of our guys on a monthly call. I always like to give a little time to human resources and to our food safety group to talk about some initiatives they have going.
Food safety is a big deal in this business. Columbia runs a series of pulse plants around the nation where we buy and store and process edible beans, so food safety is a big thing, and we have some time on our call for that. I always like to have a little time for operations and preventive maintenance. Again, we've got to run efficient facilities. We've got to maintain them, and when we maintain them, that always is a safer facility.
And then I really, Elise, get into what I like to talk about on the calls. I like to recap what we've learned from our incidents. Really important if we've had an injury that's a recordable that we learn from that process, and I like to invite our operations managers where that injury occurred to talk about what happened from their perspective, how we're going to correct it in the future, and we're going to spread that message around the organization to hopefully prevent that from ever happening again. And it's great to hear it from them.
The last two things I like to do on the calls is, to share hazard recognition pictures, right. I travel around all of our sites. Other people are traveling around to our sites, and we see things that need to be corrected. They're hazards that could hurt somebody, injure somebody. We want to make sure that we share that. So, on these calls, we have pictures we talk about, here's the hazard, here's what we can do to to prevent that hazard from happening, and then that's the corrective actions.
And lastly, Elise, what I like to do on those calls is I like to share our own best practices from our locations. I run around a lot of sites. Our guys are doing great things. They're, doing a better job with machine guards. They're tackling this issue or problem. It's great to talk to them, take a picture of it and then share it and call them out on these calls, and thank them for the good work that they're doing, not only for Columbia, but really for the grain industry as a whole.
Schafer: Now, we're in the middle of corn and soybean harvest season in parts of the country where Columbia Grain has several facilities. What heightened safety risks are you addressing with employees, especially during harvest?
Beckman: We just did a meeting here for our North Dakota region just a couple of weeks ago, and I'm glad I get to be a part of that. I get to speak for about an hour to all of our managers, operations folks. And we wanted to do this pre-harvest. We know the corn and bean harvest is going to come at us very soon, but we did this meeting a couple of weeks ago, and I got some time with the group. One of the things I like to talk about with our guys is to operate safely. We need to be staffed accordingly, right. We can't be short staffed. Unfortunately, in this business, we probably don't have the resources to be overstaffed either. In the grain business, nobody does. So, you have to run your staff right, but we need to be staffed appropriately so that we give our guys breaks, they get some rest and we watch out for each other.
I know OSHA has a big initiative around heat safety, right, heat programs, things like that. In North Dakota, just this week, it was 89 degrees. And in September, that's pretty warm for this time of year, but we have to monitor our people. We've got to make sure they're hydrated. We're going to follow the OSHA rules when it comes around that. So that's a condition that we need to talk about at harvest.
And really, lastly, I wanted to make sure I spent some time with our folks on truck dump safety. So when we're in the driveway, the elevator driveway, servicing our customers and dumping trucks, I mean, there's a lot of risks, and there's a lot of hazards there. There's moving traffic. So, we want to make sure our guys are are wearing high vis clothing just to be visible. We want to make sure they're standing in a position where they can see the driver in the rear view mirror, and the driver can see them, because that makes sure there's some communication that each of us are able to see what is going on, and we don't want to step between equipment like trucks and pup trailers, things like that. Again, that's not safe. We need to walk around them.
But, wanted to focus on that, wanted to talk about how each location has some specific procedures around that. But, we need to be heightened when we come into harvest and make sure our guys are on their game when it comes to that truck dump safety.
Schafer: Well, excellent. Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. Stuart.
Beckman: Happy to be here.
Schafer: That's all for today's Feed & Grain Chat! If you'd like to see more videos like this, subscribe to our YouTube channel, sign up for the Industry Watch Daily eNewsletter, or go to Feedandgrain.com and search for videos. Thank you again for joining, and we hope to see you next time!