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+Safety
Our business leaders and employees have made health and safety a priority, working hard to implement actions leading to continuously improving safety performance. This focus is helping to create strong safety cultures in all our plants. Our better-than-industry safety metrics positively impact productivity and
employee morale.
– Tim Gordon, Executive
– Director, Environment,
– Health and Safety
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Safety performance is the most important metric we use to track how we are managing the business. Our health and safety initiatives and processes are integrated with our overarching Tenneco Manufacturing System, which drives reduced costs and standardized global processes. The discipline and consistency provided by the T.M.S. impacts our operational performance and our health and safety statistics. We are very proud of continually driving significant safety improvements in our global facilities. We have done this using a variety of technologies, such as the Behavioral Safety Process, which has been very effective in changing at-risk behaviors to safe behaviors. One safety performance metric that we track globally is the Total Case Rate (or OSHA recordable rate). Our TCR for 2010 was 2.0, more than 50% below the most recent measure of the automotive parts manufacturing industry average.
Annually, our best plants are recognized for their leadership in creating and maintaining a strong health and safety culture. In 2010, the best small plant award went to our Palmela, Portugal facility with the best large plant recognition going to our Edenkoben, Germany location.
Relentless focus on
operational excellence
+Tenneco Manufacturing
Systems (T.M.S.)
T.M.S. is a global standardized process that continues to improve manufacturing productivity throughout the world. Over the last two years, the University Plant approach has trained all plant managers and more than 450 key staff leaders to align their operations with T.M.S. principles. Annual savings over the same period: $50 million.
– Barbara Wheat, Executive
– Director, Global Continuous
– Improvement
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T.M.S. incorporates an array of tools, such as Just-in-Time manufacturing, to improve and maintain quality while boosting the efficiency of operations. More recently, while continuing to employ these tools, attention has shifted to the sustainability of T.M.S. Training in the system’s principles and execution under the global University Plant Structure is extending its reach to the shop floor. The objective is to place T.M.S. techniques into the hands of the people actually doing manufacturing jobs.
In addition to ingraining T.M.S. into the Tenneco culture, Wheat is active in the overall improvement of industry manufacturing efficiency. As chairperson of the Education Committee of the Bluegrass Automotive Manufacturing Association, an organization comprised of Toyota suppliers in North America, she helps design the training curriculum and schedule sessions for suppliers to familiarize them with the Toyota approach, which is considered the industry standard in increasing manufacturing productivity and maintaining product quality.
+Productivity
Experiencing triple-digit growth is an outstanding accomplishment but the Buenos Aires emission control facility increased volume by 300 percent during 2010 without expanding the physical plant. Optimizing the shop floor layout and implementing the Tenneco Manufacturing System not only accommodated greater output but the manufacture of more complex products such as tubular manifolds and catalytic converters.
– Buenos Aires, Argentina
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South American productivity improvements were not limited to our Buenos Aires emission control plant. “We also gained productivity in the Rosario, Argentina, ride control facility, which increased output of shocks and struts, including new products for a pickup truck, by 35 percent year-over-year,” says Guillermo Minuzzi, managing director, South America. Supporting the increases was the implementation of the Tenneco Manufacturing System (T.M.S.).
Various T.M.S. tools, such as Kaizen and Six Sigma, helped improve efficiency and product quality. In Brazil, which has plants for emission control, ride control and elastomers, T.M.S. raised the efficiency of all three operations as output rose.
“We are pleased by the operational improvements, but it has also been gratifying to see how workers at all levels of the organization embraced T.M.S. and made use of the various tools,” says Mario Sergio Fiorante, Tenneco South America vice president manufacturing and supply chain. “As a result, we have achieved numerous small improvements that add up to large gains in our overall performance.”