Emirates Steel, a leading integrated steel plant in the UAE, has won the Safety Culture and Leadership Award 2020 by the World Steel Association (worldsteel) in recognition of its organisation-wide best-in-class health and safety protocols. Acknowledging industry excellence in safety and health since 2008, the award aims to highlight steel companies with superiority in occupational safety management, occupational health management, as well as process safety management.
Emirates Steel was recognised for its AMAN Safety Culture Transformation project. In a bid to boost safety standards and reduce Loss Time Injury (LTI) across the organisation, the two-year transformative project which was conducted between January 2018 to January 2020 enabled Emirates Steel to adopt a risk-based approach and to introduce several critical safety management processes – achieving an interdependent level of safety culture development.
Emirates Steel’s AMAN project provided training to Emirates Steel’s employees on hazard identification and risk assessment. In addition, as part of the initiative, 80% of Emirates Steel employees and contractors were trained on enhanced Permit-to-Work procedures, and more than 700 coaching sessions were delivered for supervisors and shop floor personnel. The project also led to a 56% reduction in the LTI rate over a two-year period from 2018 to 2020, and to a 26% decrease in the total number of injuries during the same period.
Speaking on the occasion, Engineer Saeed Ghumran Al Remeithi, CEO of Emirates Steel, said: “We, at Emirates Steel, are honoured to win this outstanding award given by the world’s leading global steel association, adding a new and significant milestone in our journey towards excellence in all fields. Winning this award, despite the fierce competition with the biggest global steel manufacturers, proves the effectiveness of our safety culture transformation programme. This also highlights our unwavering commitment to leading safety protocols and forward-thinking capabilities throughout the organisation.”
AMAN introduced a set of effective safety measures including a new HSE governance and performance programme with a standard dashboard that captures KPIs, facilitating effective performance discussions and driving the required actions and outcomes. HSE Principles and Life Saving Rules including rewards and recognitions for significant contributions to the company’s safety efforts were also launched. This initiative encouraged employees to make an extra effort and contribute to the overall improvement process.
Integrating safety into the daily operational processes; and introducing updated procedures on risk assessment, inspections and observations, health and safety reviews, permit-to-work, and incident investigation processes were also adopted as part of the programme. Moreover, through the AMAN project, Emirates Steel launched the MySHEQ digital platform to boost safety performance and manage HSE critical processes.
Boasting a production of 3.33 million tonnes of crude steel, Emirates Steel was named amongst the top 100 steelmakers in 2019 in crude steel production by worldsteel.
