By Ruth Kiefer, Loss Control Manager, MSc, ARM

Many of you have been with us for a very long time, and may remember when we first formed our safety alliance with the Consultation, Education, and Training (CET) Division of MiOSHA in 2007. This alliance was created in order to help our policyholders improve their shop safety and provide up-to-date education and safety training from former compliance officers. Who else would know better right?

Since that time, we have conducted over 122 joint visits with CET. Many of you have formed a valuable relationship with them and invite them back on a yearly or bi-yearly basis. Since we have found this to be a positive experience for the majority of our policyholders, we are renewing our alliance once again.

This year, we will be having our alliance signing at our annual policyholder meeting because our guest speaker is going to be Martha Yoder, the Director of MIOSHA. She will be there presenting a safety topic that is relevant to the manufacturing industries we insure.

In addition to having Martha there, we have invited our CET liaisons, Kristin Osterkamp and the CET Director, Bill Lykes to attend our luncheon. We thought this would provide an informal opportunity for you to meet them and directly ask them about the benefits of using the CET Alliance or what their program entails.

Last year, we also teamed up with the CET Division to develop two MIOSHA factsheets that pertain to some of our core industries, Machinery Manufacturing and Fabricated Metal Product Manufacturing. These fact sheets directly relate to this type of industry and contain information regarding specific safety violations that were most cited for these industries. You could look at it as a more in-depth top 10 that actually relates to your industry. A goal for our next alliance term will be to include fact sheets for the printing and plastics industries as well.

In closing, we have found that the majority of our policyholders have found it very beneficial to have a CET visit through our alliance program. If you are unable to make it to our annual meeting on October 15th, please talk to your loss control consultant as they will be more than happy to tell you about our alliance with the CET Division of MIOSHA. Be Safe!