Acquisition Safety

Protecting our people is critical to our mission of national defense. We are dedicated to ensuring our Sailors and Marines are ready at all times to carry out their mission by providing them with safe and healthful work environments. One place to start is in acquisition.

Resources

Introduction to Acquisition Safety

The Naval Safety Center maintains a group of safety experts who are familiar with nearly every major platform.  Program offices are encouraged to contact Safety Center analysts in order to identify risks documented through surveys and investigations in order to avoid these problems (and costs) in future systems.  The Safety Center can also help develop preliminary hazard lists and identify potential alternative approaches to risk mitigation.  Contact us using our feedback form or call (757) 444-3520.

The Navy and Marine Corps considers protecting our people to be critical to our mission of national defense. The Department of the Navy is dedicated to ensuring our men and women are ready at all times to carry out their mission by providing them with safe and healthful work environments. One place to start, to ensure safe equipment and workplaces, is in acquisition.

The Navy's Safety Program is dedicated to enhancing readiness but ensuring every Navy and Marine Corps workplace, both ashore and afloat, is as free from hazards as possible. Each day thousands of safety professionals team up with Navy and Marine Corps workers and leadership to establish and maintain safe work environments in what are often inherently hazardous settings - aboard military ships and aircraft at sea as well as at ground and shore facilities. Safety professionals pursue the Navy and Marine Corps's goals in many ways: they train personnel in safe practices and procedures; they oversee the procurement, installation, and maintenance of safety equipment and systems; and they continually provide recommendations for improving safety conditions.

Effective acquisition safety increase productivity through streamlined work processes and avoidance of fatalities, injuries, and illnesses. It saves large sums of money by avoiding expensive retrofits due to poor design, disability and retraining costs, and lost productivity. It improves military quality of life and military retention.

A National Safety Council Study of the Department of Defense Safety Program estimated safety losses to the Navy, Air Force, Army, Marine Corps and Defense agencies to be $10 to $20 billion per year. Adding focus to acquisition safety will significantly reduce these losses.

One of the most effective ways to ensure the safety of a system, whether as complex as a ship or an aircraft or as uncomplicated as an aerosol dispenser, is to incorporate health and safety requirements before buying or building the system, at the very beginning of the acquisition process. With the advent of rapid technological advancement and the very real threat to our national security, the traditionally long acquisition cycle of 10-15 years is no longer acceptable. In recent years, acquisition reform has accelerated the rate at which leading edge technology is harnessed for military use. Today, acquisition reform is achieved through targeting a three-pronged approach:

• Delivery of advanced technology through rapid acquisition and an integrated testing and evaluation process;
• Reduction of total ownership costs (TOC) using cost as an independent variable (CAIV) assessment; and
• Ensuring interoperability, supportability, and affordability by integrating the acquisition and logistics processes.

Providing a safe and healthful workplace to all Department of the Navy personnel by identifying and avoiding hazards early in the acquisition process is one of the DoN’s great challenges. This challenge will be met only by designing and building systems that control such established safety and occupational health hazards as noise, vibration, falls, electric shock, and chemical contamination. It is the goal of this website to promote the incorporation of safety and occupational health factors into all stages of the Defense Acquisition Process by discussing the challenges, communicating information on Best Practices, and by sharing successful DoN acquisition safety and health initiatives.

This portion of our website is a work in progress for addressing the most significant safety challenges facing the Defense Acquisition and safety communities during planning of ship, weapons, and aircraft systems. The Safety Challenges under development are:

1. Noise
2. Vibration
3. Ergonomics/Human Systems Integration (HFE)
4. Confined Space Entry
5. Heat Stress
6. Fall Protection
7. Ventilation
8. Lasers
9. Non-Ionizing Radiation
10. Electrical Shock and Other Hazardous Energy Sources
11. Aviation technologies
12. Tactical Vehicle Safety

How to Contribute to This Site

We need input from the Defense Acquisition community to address each of the Acquisition Safety challenges that are the subject of this website. Grow with us as we share information on how to meet the above challenges through the Defense Acquisition Process. Through the exchange of ideas, information resources, and improvements in methodology and design, these challenges can and will be met.

To submit general information or information on Best Practices, or to submit a success story, please send an email to safe-webmaster@navy.mil with the subject line "Acquisition Safety."

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