ArcelorMittal to act on comprehensive safety audit

The audit was carried out over nine months and involved 155 site audits covering all geographies, functions and levels of the organization. There were three main scopes:

1. Fatality prevention standards for the three main occupational risks leading to serious injuries and fatalities (work at heights, vehicle driving and energy isolation);
2. Process safety management focused on high risk assets; and
3. In-depth assessments of health and safety systems, processes and capabilities; governance and assurance processes; and data management.

The company's CEO Aditya Mittal had promised he would take a 'hard look' at ArcelorMittal's safety performance in order to identify areas ripe for improvement.

“To achieve our aim, we contracted dss+ to carry out an extensive workplace safety audit across our operations in every region of the world," he said, adding that over the course of nine months dss+ visited more than 150 sites and interviewed hundreds of employees from the shop floor to the board room.

With such an unprecedented level of access, dss+ thoroughly reviewed the company's safety practices and provided senior managers with a clear set of recommendations.

“Although the dss+ audit confirmed that we have the right policies and standards, the biggest challenge is to truly embed 'one safety culture' across the Group. The dss+ analysis makes clear that while there are areas of good practice and world-class performance, this is not uniformly the case and there are business units where improvement is required," said Aditya Mittal.

He said that the recommendations focus on lifting under-performers and consistently embedding best practices across all business units, underpinned by strong governance and assurance.

“This will not be an easy journey," Mittal said. "We have been on this road for some time already without achieving the results we want. Different outcomes require a different approach. It will require openness to doing things differently, at all levels of the organisation. I am pleased the audit confirmed understanding and support for this across all segments – we need everyone to be fully committed.

“We are now defining the most effective ways to implement these recommendations in an accelerated manner. The recommendations sound simple but there is a lot of detail that sits underneath including the site-specific work plans that are now being developed and will be the workhorse of our efforts.

“We recognize the ongoing interest of stakeholders in our progress and are committed to providing regular reports, explaining our progress on our journey to zero fatalities, as well updates on the implementation of the recommendations.”

DSS+ is an independent consulting firm which claims to have over 50 years of deep technical, operational and problem-solving experience and the knowledge to optimise operations across industries.

Davide Vassallo, the company's CEO, commented: “ArcelorMittal has made considerable effort to improve its safety standards and processes in recent years and there is understandable concern that results still fall short. Across a Group of such scale and breadth it is not surprising that we encountered considerable variability in performance. But in interactions with hundreds of people, we found all were very genuine in their desire to keep people safe and open to learning, improving and, where recommended, doing things differently."

According to Vassallo, a key finding was that while standards and protocols across the Group were broadly in line with good practice, behaviours fell short of what the policies required.

"There are undoubtedly good performers in the Group, who demonstrate all the characteristics of those companies that can sustain excellent safety results. The challenge is to raise all operations in the Group to this standard – and this is what our recommendations are fundamentally designed to address."

Vassallo said there was no silver bullet where delivering sustained, excellent safety results was concerned. He said that each of the six recommendations deserve and need equal focus as they build on identified good practices that integrate, align and connect with all safety-related activities, creating a solid foundation on which all operational activity then sits.

“The commitment of leadership is vital," said Vassallo, adding that he was reassured through his interactions that it was there at Group, segment and business unit level.

“At dss+ we passionately believe every company has the potential to operate entirely safely. ArcelorMittal, having commissioned this very detailed audit, is taking the right steps to ensure it can move in this direction.”