Doorman Fallacy – How Does this Apply to Safety, Quality, or Equipment Reliability?
Watch and Think
How many times have I seen this? Cost cuts that only consider one part of a job. Watch this quick video…
When the next round of budget cuts applied to safety, quality, or equipment reliability, are you considering all the aspects of the job being downsized?
Real Life Example
Consultants decided that a very capable oil company needed to cut costs to return higher profits. Working with senior managers, they decided that the operations folks could handle the local safety function. Also, operations could be cross-trained in maintenance and perform maintenance in their spare time.
Thus, all the local safety folks and 1/2 of the maintenance force were laid off.
About five months after the layoffs, it was discovered that the safety folks also maintained firefighting equipment. This hadn’t been previously noted. Management decided to outsource the work. The bidding and initial inspections by the contractors took six months. Thus, when the fire broke out, the firefighting equipment didn’t work correctly. That was just one of the problems discovered during the root cause analysis of the fire.
Luckily, no one was seriously injured.
It turned out that all the savings in the first year of the cost-cutting PLUS MORE was lost paying for the damage caused by the fire. And that didn’t include the lost production costs.
After the fire’s root cause analysis, the layoffs were rescinded. However, new people had to be hired and trained at a considerable cost.
Next Time
Next time cuts to critical safety, quality, or reliability functions are proposed, don’t accept the presupposed savings at face value. Think about the other potential functions of the job that result in unevaluated benefits and catches of unsafe conditions, quality slips, or potential reliability problems.
One more idea … don’t forget that saving time and effort by applying substandard root cause analysis may not produce savings. Instead, it may cause substandard learning from precursor incidents and, thus, allow a major accident that otherwise could have been avoided.
