SAFETY CRUSADER WITH HIGH STANDARDS
Haig Dikijian's expansive office in Manhattan is a time capsule of the man's colorful life and career.
The walls are lined with photographs and memorabilia that highlight a four-decades career with a company that now goes by the name of Verizon.
There are certificates of achievement, educational credentials, training program brochures and snapshots from over the years - even a cluster of conference name badges accumulated over the years. They all are testimony of one man's journey to be the best in his field.
Soon after Dikijian joined the company in l965, he took a leave of absence to serve a three-year stint in the U.S. Army. A small, unobtrusive table in his office serves as a memorial to this life-defining experience. It is adorned with photographs of his own band of brothers - fellow soldiers who made it through the Vietnam War and those who didn't. There are faded military documents - decades-old reminders of a patriot's service to his country.
When Dikijian hung up his uniform and returned to his civilian job, New York Telephone, awarded him retirement credit for his years of military service. It was a tribute of the employer's appreciation for his voluntary service to his country.
Throughout his 40-year tenure with the company, Dikijian has developed competence and expertise in all aspects of commercial trucking. He holds a commercial drivers license and worked for many years as a driver for the company. In addition, he is an authorized diesel truck mechanic, a truck body and paint specialist, a dispatcher, an equipment spec expert, and a nationally-recognized safety manager in the private truck industry.
And when he wasn't fixing, detailing, spec'ing or handling safety issues, he found time to restore and rebuild a 1970's-era tractor from the ground up, transforming the commercial relic into nearly showroom condition.
In addition to his wide range of practical truck-related skills and experience, Dikijian earned associate of arts, bachelor's and master's degrees as well as the prestigious Certified Transportation Professional (CTP) credential from the National Private Truck Council.
Starting out as a line driver in his teens with New York Telephone (a predecessor corporation of Verizon), Dikijian used the same principles of loyalty and hard work learned in the Army to rise to his current position as staff manager for safety and spec'ing for Verizon. He still shows up at work each day, armed with a devotion, passion and zeal for safety performance for Verizon's Logistics Services organization.
From eight distribution centers and numerous cross dock locations, Dikijian's group distributes giant spools of cable, telephone poles and office supplies to hundreds of operation centers around the country. His organization's efforts add up to nearly 20 million miles in truck runs each year.
Overall, Verizon boasts one of the largest private truck fleet in the United States with approximately 53,000 vehicles - most of them medium-duty utility trucks. Dikijian's Logistics Services group operates 690 power units and has 500 employee drivers. These trucks deliver all types of telephone supplies including exceptionally heavy and unwieldy cargo such as huge reels of 43,000-pound submarine telephone cable (the empty reel alone weighs 1,000 pounds).
With cargoes like these, there is zero margin for error, Dikijian says. "Safety standards, of necessity, must rise to the highest possible level, requiring an obsessive attention to detail. Our cargo demands special tractors, special trailers, special loading equipment, and special securement techniques - and specially trained drivers at every location who know what they're doing."
The mission of the Logistics Services group is straight forward. Its team must get the right product, in the right quantity, delivered to the right location, to the right person - and do so on-time, undamaged, efficiently and, most of all, safely.
"The mission sounds simple, but execution is the tough part." Dikijian says. "Our external customer does not want to hear that their phone does not work. Our internal customers at Verizon do not want to hear that the truck broke down or that we don't have a driver or that we are out of a product.
"These are simply unacceptable excuses. Management, also, does not want to hear about our having preventable accidents."
The biggest safety problem is lifting-related back injuries. No. 2 is slips, trips and falls. "In addition to our box trucks and trailers, we have a heavy haul group at each terminal that uses platform trailers (flatbeds) and drop decks," says Dikijian. "Since we operate in many colder areas of the country from coast to coast, we experience a spike in slipping accidents in the first quarter of every year due to ice and snow on our flatbeds. Since we operate around the clock, our exposure is doubled and we have to gear our training to preventing these kinds of accidents."
Verizon invests in excellent equipment, pays its drivers well, and has a strong record of productivity. It invests heavily in safety as well, including the Safety Center and its National Safety Committee, which is chaired by Dikijian.
The Safety Center is a one-stop resource for training and information. It conducts safety operational reviews at each terminal, cross dock and warehouse. The Safety Center also conducts root cause analysis when accidents do occur.
"We look at the people, the procedures, the hardware and the environment. I keep peeling the onion back, asking 'why' long enough until we eventually get the cause. This exercise helps us remember how to prevent future accidents of this kind," says Dikijian.
Safety in warehousing, trucking and supply chain management has been Haig Dikijian's life work and passion.
"At this point, I am finally beginning to know what I don't know. It has been a great ride, made easier by supportive corporate teammates, an understanding boss and my affiliation with the National Private Truck Council," he says.
"I would urge all companies with private fleets to take advantage of all the benefits that being an NPTC member can bring. Virtually every meeting I attend helps remind me of how much I really don't know - and need to know. I would also encourage individuals to pursue the Certified Professional Transportation (CTP) program, an NPTC-sponsored credential that enhances one's knowledge and career.
"It has done wonders for me!"
