Frank continues to be an inspiration to safety professionals around the world. We encourage you to listen to this Frank Bird podcast - a podcast which represents is a rare chance to hear Frank Bird in action as he interviews Frank Lothrop, General Manager of Alpo Petfoods in Nebraska, USA following Alpo's 1989 and 1990 awards for the highest ISRS score in the world.
Frank Bird starts the interview with a statement to the listener; "You are about to hear a phone conversation with the general manager of one the worlds safest and most efficient operations". What follows is a fascinating and illuminating account of Alpo's improvement journey and how they used ISRS to assist them. Frank Lothrop describes his plant's 10 year odyssey which changed their accident rate from three times to half the national average and their absenteeism rate from 7% to 0.75%. He attributes this success to the high levels of employee involvement created by implementing ISRS .
Frank Lowthrop concludes "I dont see ISRS as a safety programme, I see it as a management programme. If I had to recommend to anybody how to be a successful manager, how to carry on a successful operation, to me the audit book is an excellent text book. You follow it and you're going to have a hard time failing."
The history of ISRS
Frank E. Bird Jr. (1921 - 2007) was a safety management pioneer and the founder of ISRS in 1978 as part of his International Loss Control Institute. DNV bought Frank Bird's company in 1991 and has carried on his work promoting loss control management around the world.