British Sugar

“Trend reports used to take two days each month to produce, now with Safeguard this detailed analysis takes less than half a day.”

About British Sugar

British Sugar produces over 1 million tonnes of sugar in the UK and an additional 500,000 tonnes of animal feed from sugar beet pulp.

Project Summary

Rivo provided British Sugar with a system to improve the collation of incident data, ensure prompt investigation of incidents, dramatically enhance trend analysis, whilst ensuring corrective actions are managed quickly and appropriately.

Safety, Health & Environmental Awards/ Standards Achieved

• 2009 DuPont Safety Award
• 2009 RoSPA Awards including a Silver Award for Bury St Edmunds factory, the President’s award for Cantley factory and an Order of Distinction for both Newark and Wissington factory sites.
• OHSAS 18001 certification

British Sugar, part of Associated British Foods plc, supplies approximately half the UK’s sugar, producing more than a million tonnes each year. It has around 1000 employees and 1100 contractors working across its eight sites which include four sugar beet processing sites and two distribution centres.

Sugar production involves many hazardous processes including the need to contain potentially explosive sugar dust, managing large amounts of heavy machinery on site and up to one thousand lorry-loads of beet delivered to each manufacturing site every day.

Business Needs

Health & Safety has long been a business priority for British Sugar. Prior to 2003 they had an excellent Health & Safety record and had won industry recognition from The British Safety Council, RoSPA and had achieved OHSAS 18001.

In 2003, a company fatality led to an extensive review of the existing Health & Safety management policies and procedures. The review prompted a fundamental change in approach. It was found that there was a gap between training people in the procedures and people actually following them. The review also highlighted gaps between their existing in-house accident recording system, which made it difficult and time consuming to compile management reports from all the data related to accidents and near-misses from each of the sites for monthly Board reports. This manual process took precious time away from the safety team in analysing incidents and taking corrective action.

Solution

The review team quickly realised that a centralised incident tracking system was needed to eliminate duplication of effort and to provide timely, consistent data for analysis. One of the key drivers was the ability for a multi-site company to learn from each incident and replicate best practice across the business. After reviewing various options, a decision was made to purchase and implement Rivo’s Safeguard system.

With Safeguard in place British Sugar is able to monitor cause and effect and track actions through to completion. Emails are sent automatically to relevant members of staff and to Board members when an incident is logged. A Board director is instantly aware of the situation and can immediately pick up the phone to the factory manager to find out if they need any help. Company Safety Manager Ash Solanki believes that this level of involvement and commitment really makes a difference and has helped to improve line management accountability for safety.

Return on Investment

These changes have helped to drive operational excellence and allow British Sugar to be more proactive in their approach to managing Health & Safety. Directors have a greater understanding of Health & Safety risks with responsibilities being assigned to them and incorporated into their performance objectives. The Health & Safety Executive have written a case study on this leadership approach (see http://www.hse.gov.uk/leadership/casestudies-success.htm). Each Board member is expected to conduct a minimum of four behavioural safety audits each year. Safeguard gives British Sugar improved visibility over their state of compliance.

With these changes, British Sugar has seen a 60% fall in injuries and recorded a 75% drop in RIDDOR accidents.

Ash Solanki commented “Strategically we are more focused and we’re getting far more benefit from the way the time is spent. It has made the business more efficient.” Following the success of the UK wide implementation of Safeguard, the system has now been extended to sister company Silver Spoon.