The manufacturing industry faces constant and evolving pressures—labor shortages, compliance demands, complex production models, and the ongoing need to balance cost efficiency with employee engagement and safety. Too often, risk and safety programs operate in silos, making it difficult to act quickly or identify root causes of costly issues. But forward-thinking leaders like Don Bezek from Griffith Foods are breaking down those silos, connecting data, and leveraging leading indicators to guide smarter decisions. In this webinar, Don shares his experiences to explore how manufacturers are shifting from reactive problem-solving to proactive risk strategies that drive efficiency, reduce turnover, increase uptime, and support long-term business growth. You’ll learn how to: Identify the systemic challenges in manufacturing that contribute to labor shortages, compliance strain, and operational inefficiencies. Recognize the impact of siloed safety and risk programs and how data integration leads to faster, more effective decision-making. Apply strategies for connecting safety, risk, and business outcomes to reduce costs, enhance employee engagement, and improve overall production performance. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our webinar on how digital transformation is changing risk in manufacturing. My name is Aubrey Eyer, and I’m thrilled to be your host today. Today’s program is a prerecorded conversation between Don Bezek of Griffith Foods and Scott Raileanu from Origami Risk. Scott is also joining us to address any questions at the end of the program. If you’d like to ask Scott anything, you could submit those questions to the q and a function on the Zoom toolbar. And like I said, we’ll address those after we watch this conversation. And I’m gonna share that conversation now. Good morning, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Scott Raileanu. I am the manufacturing sales executive here at Origami Risk. We’re thrilled to have you here with us today. I’ve got a great opportunity to share some some insights from one of our clients, and to talk a little bit about how manufacturing is addressing, the risks, safety, risk management, in today’s manufacturing World. I started my manufacturing career about twelve years ago. First starting in the aerospace industry and then following that up in the building product space. But But more importantly, I’m joined by Don Bezek. Don Bezek brings more than two decades of experience in health, safety, and environmental leadership. He currently serves as the director of global health and safety at Griffith Foods, where he leads initiatives that strengthen safety culture across the organization. Before joining Griffith Foods, Don was the health safety environmental manager at Cary, supporting thirteen food manufacturing facilities across North America. Earlier in his career, he’s he held safety leadership roles at John Deere where his team achieved the lowest OSHA recordable rate in the factory’s history and surpassed ten million hours without a lost workday, as well as roles at Donaldson and and Mohawk Industries before that. With his diverse background spanning food, agriculture, and manufacturing, Don brings a global perspective to today’s conversation and a results driven approach to workplace safety and operational excellence. Don, thanks so much for being here today. My pleasure, Scott. Good to be here. Well, like I said, we’re glad that you’re here to join us, I’m excited to kick off this conversation today, not just to share Don’s story, but to highlight some of the persistent, and evolving challenges that we see across the manufacturing industry, and more importantly, how leaders like Don and you all are are overcoming those challenges. I think we know that the challenge in manufacturing is constant. Yet it evolves. Whether it’s labor shortages or raw material costs, tariffs, growing compliance demands, or evolving production models, it’s harder than ever to to keep those costs down. Right? To keep your employees engaged, retained, and and, of course, safe, all while keeping the production lines running smoothly, getting ahead of those equipment preventative maintenance, yet, right, keeping your output on target on a month to month basis. On top of those operational challenges, internal departments like risk management or compliance or safety, they they often run-in silos. And that disconnect makes it tough to spot issues early on to act quickly on them, or understand what’s really behind those those costs and what’s driving the biggest issues. But we’re seeing that more manufacturers are taking a different approach, whether it’s connecting or improving the safety and risk data, making faster decisions as a result, it it can decrease employee turnover and increase uptime and yield, and improve, of course, the bottom line. All because manufacturing leaders had better leading measures guiding them and the strategic strategic decisions that they’re making. So today is really about talking about that shift with Don. How does how does he and other leaders, you know, take on these challenges? How do they turn them into opportunities to drive efficiency or get ahead of those emerging risks? How do you retain? Right? How do you hire, Protect your people, which all working together will reduce costs within your organization and prepare for innovations in manufacturing and then, drive your organization’s growth. So, Don, we’re thrilled to have you here. We’d love to know a little bit about Griffith Foods from from an industry standpoint, footprint, maybe even some of the identity behind the the organization. Yeah. Absolutely, Scott. So, Griffith Foods, I’ve been with the company about three and a half years. We are a private family held company, and, we’ve got over twenty locations around the world. We’ve got a presence in North America, Central America, South America, Europe. Asia, we’ve got, like I said, over twenty facilities. We’re focused on ingredients primarily, and, we’re we’re a purpose driven company. You know, we are family held, and, our owners take their responsibility both to the employees and to and to our customers and to the environment, very seriously. And, it’s it’s been a fun journey, and Origami has been along that journey right with us. That’s great to hear. I think as we were talking about, as you joined the organization, you You know, kinda going through that initial assessment, you spoke about some of those values about aligning with with that family atmosphere, right, the the working together globally. Can you tell us how you did that initial assessment when you took over the the Griffith Foods DHS program? Yeah. Absolutely. So my role had been vacant for a couple years, during COVID. And, really, the focus of the prior management was was on auditing. Wasn’t as much on management systems and partnering with our employees. And one of the the key things that I I found that we didn’t have was a a management a data management system to really understand where our challenges were, where our opportunities were, and and communication too. I mean, we’ve being a global company, something may happen, say, in Thailand, I won’t find out for a week about, you know, under the the old system or lack thereof a system. So we’ve we’ve really taken that to the next level with Origami as a partner. I’ve been through numerous implementations of health and safety management systems, and, honestly, they’ve been they were a bit of a nightmare. The thing I’ve loved about working with Origami is we’ve really tailored the system to Griffith. We’ve scaled it up to to our, you know, to to our footprint. We’ve got about six thousand employees globally. The majority of those are in the Americas. But like I stated before, we we’ve got a significant presence overseas as well. As you were doing some of that assessment, right, that some of these positives, I think you’re you’re you’re hoping to look for some of the areas that needed to be addressed. Can you talk about some of the areas? I mean, you spoke about visibility a little bit, maybe even transparency. Can you tell us a little bit about the areas that you wanted to address first? Yeah. We, wanted to be able to track, our incidents and be able to, have a system in place to do corrective actions, to do root cause analysis, to really look at, our our health and safety systems holistically. And, we really again, we partnered with Origami. We customized it to exactly what we wanted. We’ve got, for example, a tiered notification, process. If there’s an unsafe condition reported, it it gets blasted throughout the internal facility. If someone’s hurt beyond first aid, that actually goes to both the regional and the global level in terms of communications. So getting those those bells and whistles in place was actually was made pretty easy. Another cool thing that we’ve done is, I mentioned the unsafe condition reporting. Initially, we set it up in in English. And Our employees in other parts of the world don’t speak English or at least as a a primary language. So we were actually able to do characters in in different languages, mainly the Asian characters being a challenge. Origami had never done that before. And they took on the challenge. And so we not only do we have the the English and the European and Spanish, but we also have Thai characters, Chinese, Japanese, you know, just so the employees, you know, the employees can use the system in their native language. We’ve also put in recognition for people in the system. And at the end of the day, we’ve got dashboards, which are pretty cool, which are highly customizable. One thing that we did too that guy origami had never done is we did a safety survey using origami using a QR code. For which we had a a huge response. We, we used different technology. The last couple years did not have as good of a response. It was super clunky. Origami, we partnered, and, now we have a a QR we had a QR code set up, had over ninety percent participation. And actually, heard today we launched a food safety questionnaire, in North America. So it’s, highly adaptable. That’s amazing. I I think when we talk with our clients about, how they how they go from assessment to improvement, you know, and and seeing what types of changes that they want to achieve. You know, you kinda beat me to the punch. Right? Like, what types of changes you were hoping to to see take place? I I heard data input there and and communicating back to the to the workforce. How how has Griffith’s focus on, you know, this visibility and, you know, consistency, if you will, maybe even accountability within EHS and and risk management evolved, right, from that very first after you were done with implementation to, you know, what you’re seeing now as the results from from some of these efforts? Well, maybe I can step back a second. So when I I I first came to the company, you know, almost four years ago, you know, I realized there was not a system in place. It was a SharePoint with a bunch of stuff thrown in there, a lot of which hadn’t been touched in over five years. And I was talking to our our senior director of risk, Jim Bowen, and we had been origami users on the risk side of the house for over ten years, I believe. And I was kind of, you know, complaining about the lack of a system. And he said, well, have you ever heard of origami? And I I hadn’t at that point. And he’s like, yeah. We’ve got this we’ve got this risk management system that we use, but they they’re now working in the health and safety space. So I’m like, oh, okay. That and but I still yeah. Like I said, I still had scars from other implementations and met with Origami, and they said, yeah. We can help you. And what I liked about the approach is the kinda let’s throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks, approach the things. We’re not we’re not working with Origami, you don’t get paralyzed by making things perfect. Okay? It’s like, let’s try it out. You know, a lot of stuff that we’ve done with origami had never been done before and especially on a global basis. So that’s how I got to got to know Origami, and it’s been it’s been pretty awesome getting having this system in place and robust in a a fairly short amount of time. That’s probably the the biggest differentiator with Origami is I mean, we were we had a working system, you know, within about six months. And everything was completely customizable. You know, we didn’t, and we’re able to steal shamelessly from some stuff, that was in the system prior. So that’s a very long answer to your short question, Scott. No. I appreciate it. I I think what what I’m hearing you say is, right, like, the the customer focus was critical to Griffin Foods, right, for for addressing the system and and the needs holistically from safety, but also the integration with risk management. And your colleague, Jim, that that’s been, you know, with working with with Origami here for for over ten years. Drawing back on on one of the the Griffith company values that we had talked about before Delivering results, and and how you guys focus on that. I I know there are leading measures, right, or and there are lagging measures. Can you talk about some of the those leading indicators, that you guys are are tracking in the system to help you make those strategic decisions, that that we intro? Yeah. I mean, obviously, when you have an accident, I mean, that’s that’s a lost opportunity. But one one of the things that we really focus on is is reporting of unsafe conditions and behaviors. For example, we’ve got a relatively small site, outside of Barcelona, Spain, and they submit at least five a day of unsafe conditions. And really being able to track to completion and assign those to people. So for example, one of the neat things we’ve done is we have we’ve got a growing lean program, and we have tiered meetings every day. Everybody has a point of contact at least once a day with these tiered meetings. And safety kicks off the tiered meeting, and it used to be, you know, was there was there any incidents or accidents? No. Move on. We’ve now what they do is, was anything reported in Origami in the last twenty four hours? Yes. Okay. Who owns it? Okay. When are you comfortable with getting it done? We have, we have iPads all over our plants that use a software package to track our manufacturing. And Origami is on every one of those iPads globally. One thing we was kinda cool we did, in the last twenty four hours. We had the icon for a a named user could, could log on. Not but one of the issues was for the unsafe reporting, a lot of our employees don’t have emails or don’t have a login. So I partnered with you guys and came up with a token that was able to be used on the iPad without logging in so people could report stuff anonymously. So that’s pretty cool. Like I said, using it for a safety survey. It’s it’s a very open architecture to the to the system. So I know you had mentioned before, right, hoping to to bring this to bring this solution that you’re using to other departments beyond just health and safety, whether it’s whether it’s ops or food safety. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, how those other departments are seeing benefits from a single source of truth? Yeah. Scott, they so we’ve got some really new really sharp people in our, FSQS department, which is food safety quality systems. And they see huge opportunities with Origami to be able to track food safety incidents, to communicate those to the organization, eventually to use it for corrective actions. And also, like I mentioned, they, they just did their first, food safety survey. So definitely some opportunities to to use in other departments. Environmental, I think, I do not have the environmental side of the house, but I definitely see opportunities for to use it for environmental and sustainability. Any lagging measures that you’ve seen, improved over the course of your tenure there at at at at Griffith that that maybe, you know, Origami has has supported? Yeah. I mean, our TRIR rate has dropped about fifty percent in my tenure. We’re able to to to get really good data. And also, I’m able to using the system, we were able to ask about SFIs, serious or fatal incidents. We act every incident has about ten questions where we ask, you know, was there a power industrial truck involved? Excuse me. Was lockout tagout involved? Was, electricity involved? And then it flags those incidents, that do involve those things. Also, like I said, just being able to the metro the the metrics of how many people are submitting unsafe conditions. But no. Our TRIR and we were able to reclassify them too because in different parts of the world, they consider everything like a lost time and how we’re able to really determine, is it really a lost time or is it not? So and that’s that’s a nice part of the system. Great, Donna. I know that for for folks in safety, right, the job’s never done until, you know, incidents and and injuries are reduced to zero. As you look at, you know, where you are now with with safety and and risk management there at at Griffith. What what is that next iteration? What’s that next thing that you guys are looking to to use your system to improve upon moving forward? Yeah. It was one of the things we’re pretty excited about, because we just brought on a new HR system, is we’re gonna be able to get very accurate hours, globally. So we’re gonna use those that hour data to normalize some of the data points we’re gathering through Origami. And I keep on talking about the unsafe conditions, unsafe acts, recognition. Okay? So if you got a plant of five hundred people and you get five hundred suggestions, that that’s probably great. But if you’ve got a plant of a hundred people and you got five hundred, that’s even better. So by having the hour data, it’s gonna normalize things. I mentioned before, we’re expanding into quality. A lot of that’s going on. We wanna have it integrated into Power BI, which is our primary source of business intelligence that we’re using. We’re starting a global audit program. This this our our new fiscal year just started a few days ago, October first. So that’s one of the things we’re bringing on. And the other thing is expanding our use within our lean our lean group. That’s another possibility. We we’ll we have a new we’ll have a new lean leader starting pretty soon, a new director, and we’d like to see what kind of synergies we can find with within the lean group. But, again, it’s very it’s it’s a very friendly software suite. The the possibilities are pretty endless. Well, it’s really impressive to hear how you guys have have made, you know, such progress in in really just a couple of years, and and love the way that you guys are thinking about how to iterate, how to expand it, and the breaking down of those silos between risk and safety and quality is really quite impressive. Well, Don, thank you so much. We appreciate the the time today. I I think today’s conversation really encapsulates how manufacturing it’s never just one thing. There are there are many different applications of a solution, and priorities and initiatives that can be addressed. And I think today shows that how the iterations are constant, are are are evolving, and, what Griffith is doing, clearly shows and demonstrates how you guys are approaching it, really in a holistic, a holistic way. So we appreciate, Don, your time here today, the audience here for joining us, and we look forward to to talk with you guys at our next webinar. Alright. It was my pleasure, Scott. Take care. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Scott. That was a great conversation between you and Don. We’re gonna open up the program for q and a now. So like I said earlier, you can type those questions into the q and a section or the chat. And we’ll start with our first question that comes through. So we had someone ask, is Origami a safety database like Intellix, predictive solutions, or other types that have these workflows? Yeah. Thanks for the question, Caleb. Origami is a cloud based software that really is a addresses integrated risk management. So you’re familiar with Intellects, other safety management systems, right, or or other options out in the marketplace. Origami can do those functions. It’s performing that for many manufacturing organizations today. But we go one step further, and I think that’s that’s what kind of distinguishes us out in the marketplace is not only is it an environmental health and safety solution, but it also expands into risk management. So your risk managers within these enterprise organizations that are procuring the insurance policies or managing their insurance managing those policies and renewals, and working with their their brokers and their carriers, Origami, integrates all that information, across those different departments as as well as the different compliance needs for governance, risk, and compliance professionals. So the answer is yes And some. Great. Thank you. We have another question that came through. What advice would you give to other manufacturing organizations just starting their digital safety transformation journey? A great question. I I think it starts with a a gap analysis. Right? You you wanna reflect in internally. You wanna get that visibility from how, the organization is currently operating. Right? You wanna engage some of your other your other stakeholders, and I think, you know, Don speaks to that, here, in the conversation. Right? Engaging your operations team. Right? Engaging HR and quality. Those are really critical to understanding how you need to to build it. And then when you start to think about building, you wanna make sure you’re doing it for scale, both internally and externally. So working with the other plants in your in your your organization, right, having those different plant managers speak to, you know, what are their priorities, but also evaluating partners that can grow with you. Right? And and and not necessarily looking for a point solution that helps you today, but rather how is this program gonna grow with us for the next two, five, ten years. And the last thing, I think, as you as you take on in manufacturing anything, right, is is let’s not let’s not let perfect be the enemy of good. Right? Starting with something and growing over time is a really great way to, to grow, with your partner, in in safety management, risk management, governance, risk, and compliance as well. Okay. Thanks. We do have another question. So how do you measure the success of EHS and risk initiatives? So what KPIs or feedback loops matter most to you and to the teams you work with? Yeah. Great question. I think Don speaks about it there as well, and and that was, like, leading indicators, lagging indicators. Right? So, you wanna start to track those unsafe conditions. You wanna start to track the engagement with your employees. Right? It it I think when you look at manufacturing, there there’s really three ways that you can, three different, pillars that you wanna look at, with risk initiatives and and EHS. Right? Are you capturing data? How are you managing that data? And then how are you improving upon that data? So leading measures, right, help lead to to lagging indicators and lagging measures. You wanna follow those engagement metrics. Make sure that the The people that that are contributing to your organization, are being heard, and then how are you following up on that? You know, what what is your response to to these, to these engagement, metrics? And then the the final piece I think that we we try to measure, honestly is is the visibility, you know, with with leadership, and then how how is that escalation and follow through being being done. So, anytime an organization wants to to improve their culture, right, it’s it’s about listening to your employees and then acting upon their employees or acting upon the employees’ feedback. It looks like that’s all of our questions for today. So, Scott, is there anything else you’d like to say before I wrap this up? No. We appreciate everybody showing up. I think manufacturing, right, is, is such a a focal point for for America and and and and the world right now. And so it’s an awesome to to get folks know, coming out and and participating in how to how to improve and and iterate, so that we can address, you know, the the newest challenges that are are facing us here in twenty twenty five and beyond. Okay. Well, thank you for that. I wanna thank everyone for joining us today, and I’d like to extend a special thank you to our speakers, Don and Scott. So thank you all for your participation, and everyone have a wonderful day. Thanks, everybody.