A Production CNC Machine Shop That Starts with Safety

Ripley Machine is a production CNC machine shop in the Buffalo, New York, area offering CNC turning, CNC milling and CNC grinding. The business was founded in the 1950s and incorporated by my grandfather, Quentin Bensink, in 1994. In 2015, I was fortunate enough to purchase the business from my grandfather.

By that time, I had grown up and been trained in an old-school machine shop. My view on safety was certainly flawed. I saw it as a hindrance to production, and as a company, we only did what was necessary to meet safety requirements. Shortly before I purchased the company, we had signed with a safety consulting group to perform safety training. We did this with an attitude of compliance and not an attitude of safety. When I saw other companies implementing safety programs, I thought it wasn’t necessary for our business, because we only hired competent employees and common sense protected us. I had a very poor attitude towards safety and as they say, “attitude reflects leadership,” so much of our company also had a similar attitude.

Over time, I began to realize that we needed to make safety more of a focus for our team. I have always been an employer who is focused on taking care of every member of our team, so I recognized that while they are coming to work here at Ripley Machine to help provide for their families, it was my responsibility to make sure they could do that safely. Our team members and their families are what matters most and by not focusing on safety, we were not practicing what we preach.

It was time to make a change. As I learned more about what successful companies were doing, I knew that we needed to prioritize safety.

We started to take our safety visits from consulting firms more seriously. Instead of treating the training as something we had to do, we took it as an opportunity to become a better production CNC machine shop that values its workers. I made sure that I attended each session of training and asked the trainer any questions that I had or thought that someone from our team might have. Instead of ignoring or pushing back on findings from the safety walk through, we started addressing and fixing them.

After a year or two of this, we realized that the company we were using for safety training wasn’t working for various reasons, but more specifically because they came once a year. We realized that safety wasn’t a “once a year” kind of thing. It needed to be an everyday thing. In the old model, we would perform a walkthrough and review findings. We would typically fix most of those findings at the time, but a few weeks later, those old issues were back in place. I would push back against the bad habits, but after a month or two, I would fall into the bad habits myself or simply forget the findings. We knew that we needed to create a new model that focused on a year-round dedication to safety.

We started working with Safety Compliance Inc. of Jamestown, New York, in the spring of 2021. The attitude of its team was instrumental in shifting the attitude of myself and my team. Both its team and our management team embraced the need for monthly visits at our shop. The company also encouraged us to establish a safety committee. My attitude and our team’s attitude started to transform and embrace a focus on safety. Our trainer presented information in a way that was a lot easier for “blue collar workers” to embrace. Instead of showing a low-budget training video, our instructor taught in an interactive manner that encouraged our entire team to get involved and relate the training to our CNC machine shop environment.

In addition to the beneficial training style, Safety Compliance also encouraged us to establish a safety team. Initially, our safety team consisted of myself, our office manager and one shopfloor team member. We held a safety team meeting every other month to address any open action items, including findings from the safety walk through that Safety Compliance performed.

As time went on, we recognized that we had transitioned our focus on safety from yearly to monthly, but still needed to refine this focus to daily. At this time, I decided to step away from the safety team and had our office manager step off the team as well. This enabled those on the production floor with the best insights into safety concerns and their resolution to engage in this task. Again, this was something that I recognized successful companies were doing.

We also added to the safety team a senior machine operator along with a shopfloor manager to the safety team. This helped us to eliminate the barrier in communication from operators on the machine shop floor to management. In addition to safety team changes, we also started a weekly safety walk through. To organize and prioritize safety issues, we divided our property into five different areas. We rotated through each week so that each area had an in-depth inspection every fifth week. We rotated inspection responsibility through the members of the safety team as well to keep fresh eyes on each area.

In addition to the safety training, we provide training and reminders on our daily company slideshow. We continually encourage our team members to identify potential safety issues and we work to address and correct those safety concerns. This transformation has led to a shift in attitude towards safety from our entire team.

It goes without saying that business today is challenging. Costs are rising while our customers are demanding lower prices and shorter lead times. However, I certainly feel that the costs of addressing safety concerns are not an area to cut back. Thankfully, we have never had a serious safety incident, but the cost of one such incident would negate any savings that we may have accumulated from not addressing safety concerns.

Also, the cost of addressing safety concerns has been relatively low. The safety walks each week take about a half hour. A lot of times, the findings of the walk can be fixed at that time or with a simple trip to the hardware store. In addition, our dedication to safety is a demonstration to our team that we are striving to be a world class manufacturer that truly cares for our team and our community.

Our dedication to safety is an opportunity to enable our actions to speak louder than our words.