SOURCE: Kay Sever | March 28, 2025
In 2025 we will focus on sustaining the gains achieved via the optimization process. Why spend a year talking about sustainability? Your optimization gains are at risk of being lost in future months/years unless certain preventive actions are taken. This risk is worth some investigation and contemplation.
During the first quarter, we introduced links between management choices and the sustainability of optimization gains… choices that remove barriers and propel you forward OR choices that create barriers and cause your gains to vaporize over time. If you make the decision to move forward with an optimization initiative, the last thing you want is watch your millions of dollars of financial gains shrink/disappear over time.
Starting this month, we will cover action plans that prevent the loss of optimization gains and set the stage for long-term success. Simply stated, if you don’t know a barrier exists, you can’t take steps to remove it. Knowing how to recognize and value barriers and voids that destroy or trap value is required to maximize your optimization ROI. To gain a broader perspective about this seldom discussed topic, let’s compare the importance of this kind of training to safety/hazard training… why both are important and why both are non-negotiable factors in your success.
Safety Hazard Training Increases Awareness
We all know how important safety/hazard training is to every operation. It is a non-negotiable priority for every mine and processing facility, regardless of product or service. Safety training (MSHA/OSHA) includes industry-specific examples, stories and exercises that help people think differently about hazards in the workplace… how to recognize them, PPE to wear to prevent or minimize injuries, and actions to take to prevent or remove hazards. Without hazard training, many more accidents and injuries would occur. With hazard training in place, almost all accidents and injuries are preventable!
Management teams value each person’s safety above all else; for that reason, managers make sure that each person attends refresher safety training annually to keep “hazard awareness” top of mind at all times. Hazard training is designed to help employees “change the way they think about safety” and make the safety of each employee the highest priority every day in every environment.
Safety and Choices: Since awareness is our topic, I am going to speak honestly about “competing priorities”, choices made each day to meet expectations, and the value of hazard training. Given the emphasis on achieving budget at most operations, employees may feel pressure to push equipment or processes to the limit to meet forecast/budget goals, especially if a breakdown caused lost production that can only be made up by cancelling scheduled maintenance or deviating from normal operating procedures. Under these circumstances, employees may make choices to increase productivity that also increase the risk of an accident or injury.
Every management team always wants employees to be comfortable CHOOSING SAFETY OVER PRODUCTIVITY in every circumstance! Hazard training helps people appropriately assess the risk and consistently make the right choice to elevate safety over productivity, knowing that a budget shortfall may be the result.
How is This Example Related to Optimization?
Just as there are safety hazards in the workplace, there are invisible “hazards” that reduce optimization gains inside the management system. Employees cannot mitigate or remove these hazards because they have no authority over management system components. Only executives and management teams can remove hazards in the management system, but they need optimization “hazard training” to recognize the hazards and know what action to take to remove them or prevent them from occurring. This is why hazard training for optimization is so important.
Safety hazard training helps everyone
- Recognize safety hazards in the workplace and
- Take preventive action to remove hazards and avoid accidents.
Optimization hazard training helps management teams
- Recognize management system “hazards” (barriers/voids) that erode optimization gains and
- Take preventive action to avoid or remove their barriers and voids (mostly for FREE!)
Both kinds of training dramatically affect the desired result, whether it’s no injuries and a great safety record or sustaining a new level of performance and millions of dollars of optimization gains into the future.
Why is the Management System Part of This Discussion?
Points of Awareness:
- Management system elements and execution strategies work well as tools for meeting budget. However, achieving optimization (“best possible performance”) is NOT THE SAME GOAL OR PROCESS as achieving budget.
- Because these goals and processes are different, some management system elements and strategies that work well for setting and achieving budget targets are “misaligned” with the optimization process, goals and strategies. These misalignments cause invisible barriers/voids within the management system used daily for management decision-making and execution.
- Without training that exposes these barriers, their cost and methods for removing them, management will not be aware of the dollars that were left on the table that could have been captured and will not understand why some dollars are hard to capture and things are hard to fix. The barriers will stay in place and reduce a company’s potential optimization ROI forever.
- The GOOD NEWS is that management teams can fix misalignments with new awareness and enhancements that facilitate achieving and sustaining optimization goals. More good news… these changes make budget easier to achieve!
Next month we will take a closer look at some of the choices covered in Hazard Training for Optimization.
Thought for the year: Connecting intentional strategies to the sustainability of optimization gains is a winning combination. Your team can maximize the chance to sustain today’s gains (and gains yet to be discovered) with tactics designed for that purpose. Taking intentional actions to sustain gains is an overlooked strategy for “being the best” in your industry and maximizing shareholder value long-term.
Kay Sever is an Expert on Achieving “Best Possible” Results. Kay helps executive and management teams tap their hidden profit potential and reach their optimization goals. Kay has developed a LIVESTREAM management training/coaching system for Optimization Management called MiningOpportunity – NO TRAVEL REQUIRED. See MiningOpportunity.com for her contact information and training information.
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- About Us
Kay has worked side by side with corporate and production sites in a management/leadership/consulting role for 35+ years. She helps management teams improve performance, profit, culture and change, but does it in a way that connects people and the corporate culture to their hidden potential. Kay helps companies move “beyond improvement” to a state of “sustained optimization”. With her guidance and the MiningOpportunity system, management teams can measure the losses caused by weaknesses in their current culture, shift to a Loss Reduction Culture to reduce the losses, and “manage” the gains from the new culture as a second income stream.
