LINK360 Process Plus - Smurfit Westrock Testimonial

My name is Steven Ross. I work at Smurfit Westrock in Battle Creek, Michigan. I'm a tech assist. I'm in charge of the lockout tagout element. My name is Chris Frontera. I'm the assistant superintendent of stock prep in the “wet end”. That's the main area for the front end of paper making. We are mainly a packaging facility. We make packaging – boxes, material.

We have a lot of equipment that will move, shift. We have unexpected breakdowns more often than not. So my responsibility is making sure we have the right procedure on the correct lockout board. Prior to Process Plus being implemented here in the mill, we used to just use our G-common file in Excel. They're fumbling through spreadsheets of 300, 400 files of just lockouts. We have to physically adjust the lockout after it’s been printed. Scribbling stuff with pen or pencil, not knowing what, who touched it.

Process Plus has helped me save time by having all my isolation points right there in the same system as where I'm building my lockouts. I can just build the isolation point within a matter of seconds, compared to 15 minutes, 20 minutes of time trying to build one in Excel. Having the ability to adapt and change your lockouts on the run, at the time that you need to change them, makes it a lot more practical and official.

They’re nice clean procedures that you can easily follow, read. Updated good pictures to see, to go out on the floor to walk down lockouts, to actually see that “Oh, this is an isolation point that I need a lock out.” I can have new employees get in the system, start building a procedure or even just print off a procedure and walk it down. It gets them up, moving, looking at the equipment, learning their equipment, getting to know it better.

They're taking ownership over their equipment. Instead of having management lock out the machine, now operators are taking it upon themselves. It's a huge peace of mind knowing, hey, we have something here that can benefit the mill as a whole that will get people more experience with lockouts. So that will take some off our plate to focus on actually job watching huge jobs with cranes and items like that. When you have people that run the equipment, work on the equipment, take care of the equipment properly, it makes life in the mill a lot easier.