Continuous improvement in a safety management system: The case of a bottling company

An appropriate approach to manage Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) is to develop management systems, which can integrate safety into the ordinary and overall management of the company. The Safety Management Systems (SMS) represents now the main instrument adopted in medium to large-sized companies, in order to minimize the occurrence of accidents and occupational diseases. The auditing phase allows the feedback necessary to reinforce, maintain and develop the ability to reduce risks and to ensure efficiency and effectiveness of the SMS. In addition, the correct operation of the SMS requires an information flow across the development, implementation and maintenance stages and the auditing/reviewing stage, in order to manage and control safety performances and to highlight any deviation from the safety improvement program. The aim of the research is to assess the capability of the OHS management system adopted in a medium enterprise operating in the industrial sector of soft drinks bottling. The current SMS complies with OHSAS 18001 standard requirements, but its structure is so singular that external auditors repeatedly challenged its effectiveness. The critical aspect is the assignment of priorities to safety interventions that is currently based on corrective factors applied to the medium risk level of each risk category. A multi-criteria decision process based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was proposed to the company by using both the traditional AHP method and a hybrid model based on Value-AHP, which is easier to understand and to apply in the company safety management routine. A three levels hierarchy was identified by considering the priority of interventions as the general objective of the assessment, four criteria for the accounting policies and eight macro-Alternatives of risk categories. The result is an integrated management system able to track all risk categories, efficiently addressing the safety improvement program.