Cummins Inc. 2007 Sustainability Report

Our goal is to
make Cummins
a best-in-class
company when it
comes to safety.
Safety
By many measures, Cummins does a good
job of providing clean, safe and healthy
workplaces for its employees. For example,
the company-wide incidence rate in 2007
was 1.5 – better than the target of 2.0
and significantly better than our industry
average. We had 30 sites go the entire
year without a single reportable incident.
Likewise, a severity rate of 0.56 was below
the target of 1.0, while lost work days rate
was just a bit above target.
These are positive signs that Cummins
takes this issue seriously and is doing many
of the right things. Still, we had too many
major safety incidents in 2007 – including
two deaths and a serious injury late in the
year. Even a single major safety incident is
one too many, and obviously a work-related
death in our facilities is simply intolerable.
The majority of those incidents can be
directly traced to a lack of standard
72 Cummins Inc. 2007 Sustainability Report
Providing a Safe Working Environment
operating procedures in facilities or failure
to enforce safety procedures, followed by
workers being injured as a result of poor
quality equipment.
The most severe injuries have occurred
when workers were performing non-routine
work on manufacturing equipment without
first following the necessary Lock Out, Tag
Out procedures. Additionally, analysis has
shown that contract workers in our facilities
are less informed and less trained on our
safety practices, resulting in a greater risk of
injury to those workers.
In addition to some specific actions aimed at
improving safety in our China facilities, which
suffered two fatalities late in 2007, Cummins
will be implementing a number of actions
and process changes across the Company.
These changes are aimed at better
educating our employees on key safety
practices, identifying and implementing best