Great Dane announced that its manufacturing facility in Statesboro, Georgia, is the winning trailer manufacturing plant in the large plant category of the 2017 Truck Trailer Manufacturers Association’s Plant Safety Contest.

“We are honored to accept this award on behalf of the leadership team and employees at our Statesboro facility,” said Dean Engelage, president of Great Dane. “We have invested considerable capital and resources to define safety as an essential priority, embed it into our culture and achieve performance excellence throughout the organization. Safety is a core value at Great Dane, and it is the way we must do business.”

This is the first time the Statesboro facility has received this award, however, Great Dane has won a total of 38 awards in various categories since the TTMA Plant Safety Contest began in 1971. In addition to the TTMA award, the Statesboro facility also received a Safety Performance Award from the Georgia Association of Manufacturers (GAM) for having zero lost work cases in 2017, and received Great Dane’s “Safest Facility” award at the company’s internal safety conference for having the best overall safety record of any Great Dane plant in 2017.

“By the end of 2017, Statesboro had an incredible 70 percent improvement on their recordable injury rate (RIR),” Engelage said. “The key to this significant progression has been a top-down approach that reaches and employs first line supervisors. Employees perform safely when leaders actively and consistently demonstrate through decisions and actions that safety is a priority.”

The TTMA Plant Safety Contest is a competition among all trailer manufacturers who are members of the organization. The award determinations are based on direct comparison of injury data from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Annual Summary Form 300A.