Workplace safety is vital for many industrial operators and manufacturers. This includes machine and process safety and is important to protect workers, avoid production interruptions and achieve maximum productivity. Here is a short list to help you conquer the challenges in manufacturing and improve productivity and safety.
1. Develop Your Safety Maturity
This is a mix of behavior, policies and procedures and use of technologies. Having a high standard in all three will mean less unscheduled downtime and a lower injury rate in the workplace. Top workers who showcase a combination of culture and compliance view safety as key to operational quality.
Assess your own safety maturity and see how you fare against others. Understanding your performance level and areas for improvement is crucial to improving safety.
2. Safety and Security Go Hand in Hand
With industrial operations becoming more connected, you should review safety risks together with security risks. Security helps protect your brand, operations and intellectual property. However, many companies often overlook the essential safety repercussion of security risks.
Manufacturers become better equipped to take on a security and safety-integrated approach when they understand the impact of cyber security threats to employees’ safety and well-being.
Sufficient educational resources, services, tools and technologies are within reach to help manufacturers meet compliance requirements, perform apt risk analyses, and lessen safety and security risks in connected operations.
3. Conduct Risk Assessments Early in the Design Process
It is critical to design risks out of machinery instead of the other way around – creating a machine and then making it safe. Most companies conduct a risk assessment. The question is when. Is it early in the design process or after the machine is designed and built?
It is vital to conduct a risk assessment early AND again after the design process, to help verify safety, productivity and compliance. Studies show that more than half of safety incidents happen outside of normal operating mode.
While several safety challenges are the same for industrial operators and manufacturers, advancing technologies help improve safety and ease compliance, while keeping operational excellence. Contact N&S Flame Spray for more information.