Capptions' Safety Industry Insights

Ardagh, as a global entity, has had a Lean Six Sigma program in place for the past 21 years. Among this, a 5S deployment which involves monthly audits. The average time that they were spending on these audits was at least 10 people per plant spending 2-3 hours to go through all the audits. Because it was mainly Excel-based, it was not standardised across the plants or regions, let alone worldwide. People were going with just a printout of the Excel, walking around the plants while taking pictures with their camera and making notes, then going back to their desks and spending hours to document what they’d found. Let’s do the math.

10 people x 56 plants x 2,5 hours x 12 months = 16.800 hours per year.

Checklists are used everywhere and for all sorts of purposes. They mitigate the risk of human error by process of checking and rechecking each and every step that is carried out. At some point, it becomes an unconscious action because we crave structure, a sense of completion and assurance of success. You probably have your own preferred checklists at home, like a grocery list or a weekly to-do list. But what’s the origin of this concept?