Chairman of the Board, MSA SAFETY INC
Innovation & Manufacturing to Meet Demand | Protecting Workers, Protecting Lives Series | MSA Safety
MSA Safety, global leader in the development, manufacture and supply of safety products that help protect firefighters, industrial workers and facility infrastructures, shares its passion for innovation and how the company is using advance technologies to develop new-to-world products that raise the bar when it comes to enhancing workplace safety. Nish Vartanian, Chairman, President & CEO discusses their mission and values and how a Thomas Edison innovation played an important role in their legacy of safety; Steve Blanco, President @MSA Americas shares how innovation is integral for developing...
Transcript (23 segments)
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Nishan Vartanian0:00
The criticality of it being effective and doing the job that they needed to do never changes. And the key there is getting quicker response time so you can protect that worker and make sure they go home safely. We're at an incredibly exciting time right now for safety and technology and where they meet.
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Narrator0:25
Driving innovation and safety in technology requires us to push beyond boundaries, taking our most advanced technologies and applying them in ways that make our workplaces safer. MSA Safety is driven by a passion for innovation, which goes well beyond the products they manufacture.
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Nishan Vartanian0:43
At MSA, staying on top of the rapidly changing PPE industry requires not only a passion for safety but having a focus on one singular mission — a mission that has not changed in over a century.
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MSA Employee0:56
And when you couple that mission with the values of the organization, you just create this incredible culture that's focused on protecting workers' lives around the world every day.
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Narrator1:06
Core values carved out more than 100 years ago by founders insisting on a better way to protect workers — at the time applying new battery technology for coal miners. So they convinced Thomas Edison to invent our first product, which was a flameless cap lamp. It's essentially the genesis of PPE and the very DNA and driving force of the modern MSA.
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Nishan Vartanian1:30
We really focus on exactly what Edison did, in using the latest technology to develop new products to protect people's lives.
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Narrator1:41
Advancing worker safety by integrating technology from other sectors to drive innovation and provide solutions.
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MSA Employee1:47
It starts with the customer — understanding our customers at an incredibly deep level, working with them to understand their problems, understand unmet needs and the challenges that they face every day, and how can we bring technology to make their job easier and keep them safe.
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Narrator2:04
Meeting the needs of people that rely on products to save lives when seconds count. Innovation in the fire service is such an integral part of what we do at MSA and has been for many, many years. Using cloud-based technology, researchers and developers created a firefighter ranging system called LUNAR — a life-saving search and rescue tool for a profession that has never had anything like it before.
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MSA Employee2:29
LUNAR is new-to-world technology. Right now we are in an amazing place in fire service where we are launching LUNAR, which is a handheld wireless search and rescue device that includes connectivity, edge detection, enhanced thermal imaging, and FAST — which is an acronym for Firefighting Assisting Search Technology. That's our search and rescue technology.
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Narrator2:47
Cutting-edge connected technologies that take firefighter safety to the next level.
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MSA Employee2:51
So we are now including not only hardware but software into fire service as well. Through innovation, specifically working with our customers, we know that LUNAR is going to be revolutionary. We also believe this is going to change the trajectory of firefighting forever.
Through sharing research, new technologies can be applied to workplace safety in multiple professions. So we're able to take the previous technology we have for industrial respiratory protection and our firefighter equipment and merge some of the ideas in order to create some new healthcare respiratory protection.
It's a focus on understanding customer needs and then finding ways to adapt technology to meet those needs. It is beyond just the innovation technology — it is the deep customer intimacy that led to design of the product, and we keep that in mind in our manufacturing plan as we manufacture it.
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Nishan Vartanian3:42
Literally creating opportunity to lead innovation in safety technology — and that's really the shift that's happened with the innovation behind safety products and protecting workers around the world.
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MSA Employee3:55
It's a key focus for us — getting very close with our customers, understanding their pain points, and how we can develop products to get them home safely at night.
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Nishan Vartanian4:03
And pushing boundaries to embrace change at every level. What you're going to see more and more from us is more connectivity, more devices that work together, more protection for the individual worker — whether it's a firefighter or an industrial worker — as well as what's happening within the work site.
We're constantly evolving the technology and the connected solutions so that not only does your fall protection know if it's connected and in the future sending that status out somewhere, but your portable gas detector is monitoring your environment, connecting to that same ecosystem. So trying to bring it all together.
For MSA, safety is all we do and it's all we've ever done. It's one of the many ways it is connected to and supports the mission of the ISEA. I think the relationship the ISEA and MSA have are so integrated with the culture of safety and the maturity through the years of safety throughout industry.
As a matter of fact, the first chairman of the ISEA was John T. Ryan.
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Narrator5:06
Precision engineering and innovation — ensuring people around the world work in the safest environments possible.
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Nishan Vartanian5:12
I think our roots go back to Thomas Edison because our founders were tinkerers. I looked at them as tinkerers — they tinkered and came up with the product, the first mining cap lamp. And I look at our design teams today worldwide, they're still tinkering. So what I feel really good about is whatever the challenge tomorrow, whatever the needs, I think we will evolve, MSA will adapt, and we'll find a solution that will really be designed with the customer in mind.
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Narrator5:39
Innovation and safety technology goes well beyond the products MSA manufactures. Innovation is part of MSA's legacy, its DNA. And it starts with having a deep passion and understanding of the people who rely on these products to help protect them at work, so that they, their families, and communities may live in health throughout the world.