Context
In some production areas, containers that fell broke on the hard floor. Three costs at once: a safety exposure for whoever was standing there, clean up time and disruption to a line that was running fine.
The surface decides how fast a spill is cleared, how safe a walkway is on night shift and how much of the maintenance team's week goes on clean up. It also decides what the place feels like to work in, which is real and hard to put on a business case.
What I did
Scoped and delivered an A$200k upgrade: enamel surface treatment plus polymer safety matting, sequenced around production so the floor never came out of service. The matting absorbs impact, so less glass breaks on landing and what does is easier to clear.
Unlike the line speed work, this was planned front to back. Physical scope, contractor access, installation sequence, safety controls and shutdown requirements were all settled before anyone started, because the job had to go in around a 24/7 line. I set the pilot scope and trial area with production and plant leadership, coordinated suppliers and contractors and built the plan around when the line could give up the floor.
The risks were safety, the contractor interface, installation timing, production disruption and whether the flooring would hold up in service as well as the datasheet said.
Result
Less broken glass, a safer floor and a factory that looked like somewhere the business cared about. One area first showed how the surfaces coped with real traffic and breakage before the whole site was committed. They coped, and the upgrade went site wide, which is the clearest evidence available that it was judged worth the money.
What I'd do differently
We never put the measurement in place. No slip and trip baseline, no breakage count, no clean up hours before the work started. The long term benefit is something I believe and cannot show you. The project was scaled on judgement, probably rightly, and I cannot prove it. That is on me.
Two weeks of counting before you start costs almost nothing and turns "the floor is better" into a number. I would not run a safety or efficiency project without a baseline again. On the CSRD framework later, the measurement was defined before the deliverable.