The Effect of Lean Tools on the Safety Level in Manufacturing Organisations

Abstract

Abstract Lean Management is currently one of the best-known and is the most widely used management concepts in production enterprises. Lean creates such a culture of work in an organization that makes all participants in the organization interested in raising the level of quality, reducing costs and delivery time. However, there is no information about the influence of lean tools on the level of safety in production organizations. The paper presents the influence of five lean tools on the safety level by the example of metal manufacturing organization. The number of potentially dangerous situations and the number of accidents were taken as the measure of safety level. The obtained results indicates that the most important for the safety level is 5S, TPM while Kaizen, Poka-Yoka and VSM are smaller. The paper aims to broaden the knowledge about the dependence of the use of lean tools on the level of occupational safety.