Hilding Anders offers a wide range of products that help people sleep better. Its team of close to 5,000 individuals is a global leader in sleep products and services. With a broad portfolio ranging from luxury and premium to international and local brands, the company delivers sleep products and services for all needs in over 40 countries worldwide. Hilding Anders is the largest bed manufacturer in Finland, and all its products are produced in Närpiö.
Hilding Anders digitalised risk assessment with Impact
In spring 2021, Hilding Anders Finland digitalized its risk assessment and safety management by implementing the Impact solution. Finland’s largest bed manufacturer had clear requirements: the company wanted an easy-to-use solution that supports multiple languages and is available in a single application. The Hilding Anders plant is located in Närpiö and the company’s working languages are Finnish and Swedish. The company also uses English, because its parent company is Hilding Anders Group, a leading global bedding and mattress manufacturer.
“Safety is the top priority for our Group, and we monitor it continuously. Implementing Impact allowed us to centralize safety management in a single risk management software. Now we can deal with any problems as soon as they are detected. It’s important for our employees to get home safely,” explains Andreas Ekholm (Plant Manager).
At Hilding Anders, digitalization of risk management and the switch to Impact is most visible as a decrease in time-consuming manual work and the fact that the company now receives information about the status of safety on a continuous basis. The number of observations made by personnel has increased because they can be made quickly on site. Corrective measures following those observations can also be targeted immediately and their implementation monitored. All the information accumulates in Impact, which has tools that make it easy to analyse and compile safety data.
Mobile Reporting and Chemical Register as part of risk management at Hilding Anders
Hilding Anders uses the Mobile Reporting and Chemical Register modules of Impact. They were implemented in phases, which made it easy for everyone to keep up with the change. Mobile Reporting at Hilding Anders includes internal audits (5S auditing), monthly safety rounds and risk assessments. Implementation of observation and accident notifications is also in progress.
“We’ll be implementing Impact’s observation and accident notifications soon. The test phase has shown that these dynamic templates(*) work really well,” says Ekholm.
Chemical Register is an essential part of preventing accidents, even though Hilding Anders uses very few chemicals. The company manufactures beds in a responsible manner, and the materials used in production are selected with care. Any risks caused by chemicals during work are primarily associated with other work tasks at the plant.
“We use very few chemicals; mostly in servicing, warehouse and cleaning work. The Chemical Register makes chemical data easily accessible to everyone, regardless of whether this involves taking action in an accident situation or selecting the required personal protection equipment,” clarifies Ekholm.
“We already had low numbers of accidents and sick leaves to begin with. The number of safety-related observations we receive has clearly increased after we started using Impact, and we now have even less accidents and sick leaves.” Andreas Ekholm, Plant Manager.
Impact’s customizability supports the multilingual work environment at Hilding Anders
The fact that Impact can be customized played an important role in determining how the system could be used in Hilding Anders’ multilingual and multinational work environment. It’s been helpful in daily work at the plant and when meeting needs and requirements coming from the parent company. Impact has handled the challenges well, because it’s easy to customize and the system currently supports 16 different languages.
“We’ve been able to edit the Impact templates to suit our needs whenever necessary. The system’s customizability and its language choices allow us to transfer monitoring needs originating with the parent company directly to Impact without having to translate them separately. In addition, all our employees can use Impact in their mother language, which ensures that everyone feels confident using the system,” explains Ekholm.
The customizability of Impact has also had a direct effect on risk assessment. For example, Hilding Anders has started using a risk matrix(**), which is an idea that came from the company’s employees. This was possible because development proposals can be collected in Impact, after which main users edit and create new tool templates that can be implemented immediately. Hilding Anders has also been satisfied with the cooperation with the Impact team.
“I like the Impact team’s attitude, because they listen to customer needs and continuously develop the service. We’ve always received help when we’ve needed it. On the other hand, once a person has learned the logic of Impact use, they can customize its functions and build different templates for company use. Only the sky is the limit,” praises Ekholm.
The most significant effects of Impact on safety culture at Hilding Anders:
Digitalisation of safety management
increase in the amount of safety data and easier data management
Easy and quick to use
the personnel makes observations about even the smallest things
Diverse information available from all company levels
the possibility to react faster to deficiencies and prevent accidents
