Sustainability
A three -time Alabama Manufacturer of the Year award recipient, Austal USA believes that a knowledgeable leader is a valuable leader. Supporting this philosophy, Austal provides a variety of training programs. All employees and leaders participate in a day-long new employee orientation followed up with an annual half-day compliance training program. Both programs provide employees and leaders with tools and resources to enhance teamwork, communication and awareness of important daily business skills and knowledge which aid to maintain our organizational performance.
Innovation and continuous improvement are so important to our business model we use multiple avenues to make sure we are exploring every opportunity. Austal provides employees from all levels of the organization with Lean Training. The center piece of Lean Training is the Rapid Improvement Workshop where-in a team of employees review and address a specific area of work for application of Lean principles and continuous improvement to prove to ourselves that we are doing things in the most efficient manner. We use a Formal Change Request where any employee can outline a change they think will improve quality, improve efficiency, improve safety or save material. We also utilize an Advanced Shipbuilding Team made up of our most experienced shipbuilders. They walk the modules and ships to take a fresh look at our current process to verify our current build strategy is the best possible solution. Lessons learned from a completed vessel are so important that we hold an all-craft review within 48 hours of the completion of each module of a ship just to get improvement input from all parties.
Austal USA takes pride in the safe working environment that we provide for our employees both locally and at our satellite offices around the country. Since 2008 we have proven our commitment to safety time and time again by maintaining a Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) that has been well below the respective Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) Industry average assigned for shipbuilding. Our merits and performance have earned Austal USA multiple safety performance-based awards issued by both the Shipbuilders Council of America (SCA) and the American Equity Underwriters (AEU).
Austal promotes a culture where harm to people is unacceptable and has adopted a planned approach to continuously improve our safety and health performance, despite being one of the safest shipyards in the U.S. We continue to weigh the potential safety and health risks of our activities and integrate these considerations into our planning, decisions and processes, ensuring the way we conduct our business does not risk the safety and health of our employees, contractors, clients or guests.
Austal is committed to achieving compatibility between economic development and environmental maintenance. We seek to ensure throughout all phases of our activities that Austal personnel and contractors give proper consideration to the care of the air, land, water and resources. To fulfill this commitment, Austal observes all environmental laws and are consistent with the principles of sustainable development.
