PRINT ADS

The lunchroom at Crescent Printing was filled to bursting last week as the Onalaska company’s staff of about 50 gathered to mark a milestone. As of May 7, the company had gone 10 years without a missed workday because of a workplace injury.

“This is kind of a monumental event, considering we’re in the manufacturing industry,” said Roger Bjorge, co-owner of the company with Jim Lund. “It’s a great accomplishment.”

“You could say it’s unprecedented in manufacturing,” said Bob Sargent, the company’s general manager.

Al Pierce, a representative of the the company’s worker’s compensation insurance company who has been in the field for 16 years, confirmed that going 10 years without a serious injury is quite a feat. “It’s just really unheard of,” Pierce said.

Of course, it’s no accident that they haven’t had any bad accidents at Crescent Printing. The company puts a big emphasis on safety, with a rewards program that offers extra incentive to pay attention to safety issues.

A safer workplace also is a byproduct of the “lean” approach to business Crescent Printing has adopted. “The very foundation of lean is the absolute elimination of waste,” said Bette Smith, who has spearheaded the company’s lean initiatives.

That means not only eliminating material waste but also wasted motion and effort. In the past couple years, most of the plant has been reorganized to be more efficient. Smith said the company uses a “Six S” approach developed by the Milwaukee School of Engineering: sort, straighten, sweep, schedule, sustain and safety.

In reality, safety doesn’t really come last, but Smith mentioned it last because the MSOE model started as the “Five S” approach. Crescent added safety as the sixth “S.”

To implement the “Six S” strategy — which sounds strangely like “success” — Crescent formed an audit team of 20 people, drawing from all the company’s departments. The diversity of the audit team membership has helped create an enhanced sense of company unity, Smith said.

“It’s created good teamwork, really good teamwork,” Smith said.

To celebrate the 10-year mark, the company treated the staff to lunch from Burracho’s and conducted a prize drawing. Getting everybody in on the celebration made sense, company officials said, because everybody contributes to safety.

“The thing that’s different here is we create a culture where everybody is empowered to say when something is wrong,” Smith said. “It’s just what we do.”

“Everybody’s made a supreme effort to watch out for each other,” Lund said.

Lund’s father, Everett, got into the printing business in the 1930s, kind of by accident. His first big account was printing labels for the now-defunct Onalaska Pickle and Canning Co. Everett Lund bought the La Crosse-based Crescent Printing Co. in 1956 and moved the firm to Onalaska in 1978.

The company also had reason to celebrate last fall. Crescent was one of 18 companies nationwide to earn the “Best of the Best” designation from the Printing Industries of America/Graphic Arts Technical Foundation.

The award was based on management practices, work environment, training and development opportunities, financial security, work-life balance, recognition and rewards, health and wellness programs and, last but not least, workplace health and safety.

Contact Randy Erickson at randy.erickson@lee.net or (608) 786-6812.