Materis is one of the world’s leaders in speciality chemicals for the construction industry.
The group has four main activities: paints, mortars, aluminates and additives.
The company employs 8,800 people worldwide on 88 sites.
Safety is one of the Group’s fundamental values.
The Materis safety project
With a frequency rate of 60 in 1995, the International Safety and Environmental Coordinator, Jean Dagios, could only declare that:
Our safety record is not good, but we have taken actions to address the problem.
At that time, senior management was totally committed to the project, with the implementation of a safety management system and the appointment of a Safety Coordinator. The results were spectacular, as the frequency rate dropped to 12 by the end of 1999.
After such a spectacular achievement, the problem was not so much reaching the objective, as maintaining it.
By 2001, the frequency rate was back up to 20, and management had to think about actions that would both reduce the rate and maintain it in the long term.
Materis calls in ETSCAF to achieve durable safety results
In 2005, Materis called in ETSCAF to take targeted action on middle management, in the form of a major awareness-raising campaign and the deployment of a specific field tool.
The goal was to lay down a sold basis for the next step in Materis’ safety culture: the move towards interdependence.
This tool formed a tight fit with the other tools, such as cause trees, risk analyses and theme-based safety meetings. The essential goal of the tool was to bring the personnel onboard.
Field safety tools: simple and immediately operational
The ETSCAF field safety tools deployed at Materis were designed to achieve efficiency.
Observation phases were followed by reviews with a manager, and then a summary report was drawn up.
Materis had understood that safety is a never-ending process.
Efforts now had to be renewed to aim for zero accidents.
The initiative had proved its worth until the end of May 2009, including new companies in China and Argentina. The frequency rate at Materis dropped to 5.
The Materis Group’s target for 2012 was to reduce the rate to below 5, and to keep it there.
In 2015, Materis became Cromology. The Group turned entered a new phase in its history, which dated back more than two and a half centuries.
