Employee safety is a term widely used across many companies, especially manufacturing facilities. When we take a deeper dive into what safety means to each employer, do they have appropriate policies, procedures, and most importantly a safety culture? The answer is more than likely maybe! Every employer strives to keep their employees safe, but the best policies and procedures can easily be forgotten or overlooked to get a job or project done to keep production running and material out the door. A safety culture is key for every employee, contractor and visitor that works or comes on site, ensuring they come home to their families. Culture and making safety a priority starts with senior management and goes down to the operators and facility employees. A holistic approach to safety is not just putting together a policy book, but reinforcing through effective communication and continually updating them to ensure compliance to the most up to date standards.
Every year as a part of OSHA’s Top 10 Violations, failed Lockout Tagout programs and the misuse and lack of consistent utilization results in LOTO being the number two most cited violation. Every organization has a written policy on how maintenance or contracted partners are to use when performing work on specified machines, however the risk versus reward of getting work done quicker comes into minds in some of these applications. Below is a video that is published online showing how even the most safety minded company can have an employee with good intentions get hurt or even worse lose his/her life.
This video was not meant to be one that scares you but one to bring light that one wrong action can lead to a catastrophic result. Workers servicing and maintaining machines or equipment may be seriously injured or killed if hazardous energy is not properly controlled. As found in the video, the loss of life can occur but injuries can also occur which may include electrocution, burns, cutting, lacerating, amputating, fracturing body parts, and others.
OHSA provides, to employers, a Lockout Tagout fact sheet that describes practices and procedures necessary to disable machinery or equipment to prevent hazardous energy release. The OSHA standard is 29 CFR 1910.147 for general industry guidelines on controlling this hazardous energy. If an employer has knowledgeable staff, they can implement a program, however the more common situation is to outsource to a company that specializes in Lockout Tagout audits, updates, and other safety services. These companies have highly trained and degree engineers that can identify and assist in helping you define the procedures and policies as well as the ongoing culture management through training and continuing education services. This not only provides standards based expertise, but also allows the employer to save time and money to get this policy and procedures in place. Typically, it takes employers four weeks to get 100 procedures developed and written, while outsourcing on average takes 1.4 weeks.
Safety is important for every employer and their employees, but all employers are tasked with making profits and doing more with less each and every year. By doing more with less, every employer must focus on productivity and increased machine efficiencies. One way of doing this is taking a look at your established LOTO policies and procedures to help lessen the amount of downtime on machinery. In what is called a modern LOTO program, simple lockouts for equipment, such as conveyors, can be reduced from one hour to only five minutes on average. How is this done?
SMC and our highly trained engineers, in partnership with Rockwell Automation, are able to work with employers to customize a program that focuses on policies, training, procedures that are more graphical based than text for each specific machine selection of the appropriate lock for each machine to ensure easy access, and auditing that lessens the employers burden rate on maintaining the program.
How easy would it be for even the most inexperienced employee to follow a procedure like this?
Every day we put ourselves in harms way, but if we can help lessen the amount of risk employees take doing their jobs (allowing their companies to succeed and keeping them local to our markets) we consider this long term success.
If you are interested in learning more about how a proper Lockout Tagout procedure can help increase your productivity, contact us today or learn more about the SMC Lockout Tagout Services.