Statistics: An Introduction to a New Way of EHS Analysis and Reporting

Statistics: An Introduction to a New Way of EHS Analysis and Reporting 
Mark Fessler; Tokyo Electron America, Inc.

EHS in our industry has radically improved through the late 1990’s but especially during the last seven years due to top-down safety cultures established by many leading U.S. chipmakers. They in turn, pushed it further down to the major capitol equipment suppliers. The initial improvements could be readily seen in lagging indicators like OSHA’s Recordable Incidence Rate (RIR). This has been acceptable until now… but not moving forward, primarily because we have unfortunately stabilized above a “zero-incidence rate”. The rapid EHS improvements which reduced the RIR are no longer occurring. If we mathematically model our improvement over the last decade, and if we continue at the current improvement rate of our industry, it will be years, even decades to reach the goal of zero incidence rate. So, as EHS Professionals, we must ask ourselves these important questions: Is there more information with the EHS data we collect than is currently being revealed? Should we collect EHS data in different ways to better capture this potential hidden information? The answer to these questions is?YES, with the aid of statistics! Proven statistical methods already exist, and new software developments can allow easy application of even complex statistical methods. It is time to introduce statistical methodologies to our EHS leading and lagging indicators for success. This introductory discussion will include some basic statistical data collection procedures and analyses but due to time limits, it cannot provide adequate attention to ensure even elementary statistical training. Thus, to help bring clarity to this topic, some example analyses will be shown, and example proposals for future investigation will be presented.