Increasingly, the digital transformation of industry means safer, more efficient operation, increased production and improved quality. Every company’s path to digital transformation is different, but requires competencies such as automated workflow, decision support from systems, workforce upskilling and change management.

People from process industry companies looking to learn how to improve their operations and to share their knowledge gathered for the Emerson Global Users Exchange Americas conference Sept. 23 – 27, 2019 at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Conference Center in Nashville. The huge facility (the largest non-casino hotel/conference complex in the U.S.) hosted 2,600 users and Emerson representatives for the week.

In business-to-business (B2B) sales and distribution, as in many parts of the economy, new technologies and new business models are shaking things up. The kind of changes that revolutionized retail sales are working their way into B2B.

Editor’s Note: We continue the series written by John Ballun, President and CEO of Val-Matic Valve and Manufacturing Corp. and released in 2016 as a book dedicated to the mentors who saved him and others from making costly mistakes in the field. Ballun’s enlightening and humorous stories are a popular read in the valve world.

The central character, Duke Waters, is a compilation of Ballun’s mentors; the stories are about what he learned. In this fifth installment, while out playing golf Duke and Johnny B notice the course’s irrigation system acting up and offer a solution.

Herbert William Heinrich, author of Industrial Accident Prevention, A Scientific Approach, devised a way of understanding the relationship between unsafe acts and workplace injuries. He illustrated this with a triangle diagram, such as the version shown in Figure 1.

Here, for every 600 unsafe acts 30 near misses are likely to occur, 10 minor injuries and one major injury. The U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics reports 2,236 work-related fatalities in 2017 due to falls, contact with objects and equipment, exposure to harmful substances or environments, and fires and explosions. In the same year, workers experienced 882,700 injuries that caused them to miss work afterward.