How Henkel Achieved 72% Reduction in Safety Incidents with Visionify's AI Platform

Client Profile

Industry: Manufacturing (Chemical & Consumer Goods) Size: 50,000+ employees across global manufacturing facilities Operations: Production of adhesives, sealants, beauty care, and laundry & home care products

Henkel is a global Fortune 500 company operating manufacturing facilities across more than 75 countries. Their production environments involve hazardous chemicals, heavy machinery, and complex logistics — making workplace safety a core operational priority. Despite strong safety programs and a committed EHS organization, Henkel recognized that manual monitoring and periodic audits could not keep pace with the scale and complexity of their operations.

The Challenge

Henkel's manufacturing facilities face safety challenges common to large-scale chemical and consumer goods production: high foot traffic, forklift and pedestrian interaction zones, mandatory PPE requirements for chemical handling, and restricted access areas adjacent to active production lines.

Several gaps made consistent safety enforcement difficult:

• Inconsistent compliance across shifts: PPE adherence and protocol compliance varied significantly between day, evening, and night shifts, with no real-time visibility into violations as they occurred.
• Manual audits couldn't scale: Safety walkthroughs provided only periodic snapshots. High-risk behaviors between audit cycles went undetected and uncorrected.
• Reactive incident management: The existing system surfaced problems after injuries or near-misses had already occurred, limiting the ability to intervene before harm was done.
• Limited data for root cause analysis: Without automated logging, identifying patterns — such as time-of-day trends or location-specific risk factors — required significant manual effort.

The Solution

Henkel partnered with Visionify to deploy an AI-powered safety monitoring platform across their production floors. The solution was designed to deliver continuous, real-time visibility without requiring infrastructure replacement.

Key capabilities deployed:

• PPE Compliance Detection: Continuous monitoring for helmets, gloves, safety glasses, and chemical-resistant gear across all production zones, with alerts triggered on detection of violations.
• Forklift Safety Monitoring: Detection of unsafe proximity between pedestrians and moving forklifts in shared transit corridors and loading areas.
• Restricted Area Monitoring: Automated alerting when unauthorized personnel enter controlled zones, confined spaces, or high-voltage areas.
• Spill Detection: Early identification of liquid spills on production floors, enabling faster response before slip hazards develop.
• Real-Time Safety Dashboard: Centralized visibility for safety managers across shifts, with incident logs, trend analytics, and escalation workflows integrated into existing EHS processes.

Implementation

Visionify conducted a phased rollout that minimized operational disruption and demonstrated value quickly.

Phase 1 — Assessment & Configuration (Week 1): Visionify's team conducted a site survey of Henkel's existing camera network, mapped high-priority risk zones, and configured AI models for the selected safety scenarios.

Phase 2 — Initial Deployment (Weeks 2–3): The platform went live across 2 production lines and all common areas. No new cameras were installed — Visionify integrated directly with Henkel's existing CCTV infrastructure. Safety managers were onboarded to the dashboard and alert system within the same period.

Phase 3 — Full Facility Coverage (Weeks 4–6): The deployment expanded to cover all production floors, warehouse areas, and loading docks. Alert thresholds were refined based on initial operational data to reduce false positives while maintaining detection accuracy.

The entire process required no capital expenditure on hardware and minimal disruption to production schedules.

Results

Within 90 days of full deployment, Henkel reported measurable improvements across all tracked safety metrics:

• 72% reduction in recordable safety incidents across monitored facilities, driven by real-time intervention and behavioral correction before escalation.
• 96% PPE compliance rate, up from a baseline that varied significantly by shift and location.
• $1.8M in annual savings, reflecting reduced incident-related costs including workers' compensation, production downtime, and regulatory penalties.
• 310% ROI realized within the first year, factoring in deployment costs against documented savings and avoided incident costs.
• Safety audit time reduced by over 40%, with automated logging replacing a substantial portion of manual inspection effort.

What's Next

Encouraged by the results, Henkel is expanding the Visionify deployment to additional manufacturing facilities across North America and Europe. Planned additions include ergonomic risk detection to address repetitive strain exposure and behavioral analytics to support predictive safety programs.

Henkel's EHS leadership is also evaluating integration between Visionify's incident data and their existing EHS management platform to create a unified safety record across all global sites.

"Visionify gave us continuous visibility that manual audits simply cannot provide. We're catching violations in real time, correcting behavior before incidents occur, and building a data foundation that will drive our safety programs for years to come."

— Senior EHS Manager, Henkel Manufacturing Operations