ISRI 2016 Convention: Certifying quality

Quality plays an important role in driving down costs for recyclers, and industry certifications can help to clean up quality, according to speakers at the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) 2016 Convention & Exposition held April 2-7 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas.

Speakers in the session “The Art of Maximizing Profit: The Real-Life Stories of Certified Facilities” shared their experiences of saving money and improving their operations through better-trained employees and more efficient procedures.

Corey Dehmey, a consultant with E11 Consulting LLC, Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, said several factors drive costs for recyclers, including management overhead, inefficiencies, idle time, rework, defective products and putting out fires. To save money, recyclers should focus on maximizing throughput, minimizing defects and delivering quality to customers, he said.

“Quality costs money; you have to put resources toward it,” Dehmey said.

He said industry certifications, such as RIOS (Recycling Industry Operating Standard), are an opportunity cost. “Yes there’s a cost, but you need to look at the return on investment,” Dehmey said.

RIOS is an integrated quality, environmental, health and safety system based on ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 that focuses on aspects relevant to the scrap recycling industry. The six components of RIOS cover general requirements, policy, planning, implementation, checking and corrective action and management.

RIOS requires putting controls in place to serve as checks and balances, Dehmey said. The certification requires quality planning, defined accountability, competency for each job, controls based on quality risks, review prior to product release, nonconforming products control and continuous improvement, he said.

In addition, Dehmey said, RIOS holds employees accountable; serves as a roadmap to replicate and expand; provides feedback to leadership; offers health and safety benefits, regulatory support and environmental protection.

While getting started with RIOS can seem “overwhelming at first,” said session moderator Jeremy Miler of Wm. Miller Scrap Iron & Metal Co., based in Winona, Minnesota, at the end of the day, the benefits outweigh the daunting sentiment.

Furthermore, considering RIOS is specifically tailored toward each company, Miller said Wm. Miller found that it had most of the RIOS procedures already in place. The company had never actually written them down, he said.

Miller said, “We’ve seen tangible and intangible benefits [from RIOS],” adding that the certification body has been “so much more efficient for our business.”

For Brian Conners, president of ARCA Advanced Processing LLC, Philadelphia, RIOS has been the answer to several of the company’s problems. Conners said RIOS “really has had a tremendous effect on my company.”

ARCA Advanced Processing employs advanced technology to refine traditional appliance recycling techniques to achieve revenue-generating and environmental benefits. The company is one of three business components of the Minneapolis-based Appliance Recycling Centers of America Inc.

Conners said ARCA Advanced Processing has a number of different processes. Yet, the company had several operational issues that needed addressed. “We asked, basically, how do we run a better business,” Conners said.

He explained how the lack of training for workers resulted in a number of setbacks, including different workers making the same mistakes; increased injury rates; more days of missed work by workers; and a misunderstanding of the company’s objectives.

“I knew we had a problem when workers couldn’t explain why the company does what it does,” Conners said of ARCA Advanced Processing employees.

He noted that he has been attending ISRI conferences for a decade, and admittedly questioned the role of RIOS without looking into the certification body. “How is this going to make me better?” Conners speculated.

Once ARCA Advanced Processing got involved in the RIOS process, he said he soon learned of its advantages.

To start, Conners acknowledged that he “had no idea how we were training our people. I learned that through RIOS.”

Working toward the certification, he said the process became a team-building event, and provided results that could be measured. As injury rates occur most often with new employees, Conners said, the company started to see the value of maintaining longer-term employees. Workers and new hires attend “boot camp,” a two-hour video with PowerPoint presentations that detail the job and expectations, as well as the purpose of the company’s daily operations. ARCA paired new workers with experienced employees.

Within one year of implementing RIOS, ARCA Advanced Processing’s worker’s compensation premiums declined by $100,000, he said.

Compliments also came pouring in, from noticeably cleaner ARCA yards to informed employees. “And this is the biggest compliment,” he said in reference to better-trained employees.

“It all starts to pay off and it pays off in many areas,” Conner said.

He ended his presentation by asking the audience members, “If you’re not RIOS certified, then why not?”

The ISRI 2016 Convention & Exposition was April 2-7 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas.