Monthly Archives: January 2013

Preventative Maintenance

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Twitt

The maintenance of your company’s machinery may not seem very important to your Safety and Health Management System at first glance, but it is actually a key component to ensuring safety. Machinery that falls into disrepair can be dangerous in a number of ways and can violate any one of a number of OSHA procedures. Further, improperly maintained machinery will need costly repairs more often than properly maintained machines, and will need to be replaced more frequently, and both of these outcomes will directly impact your bottom line.

That is why preventative maintenance is so important to your business. Proper machine maintenance needs to be included in your safety plan, and needs to be properly monitored and regulated. Otherwise, no matter how well you plan out other things, such as your lockout tagout procedures, you will not be able to properly account for machine malfunctions, glitches, and other issues. The best safety plans in the world can not account for malfunctioning machinery that is not properly maintained.

Fortunately, preventative maintenance is not difficult to monitor and track. The first step to ensuring your machinery is consistently running properly is to determine what maintenance is required and with what frequency – every shift, daily, weekly, etc. Once you have determined the activities required and their frequency, you need to come up with a system to allow your team to track the maintenance activities they are performing on each machine.

We have found that preventative maintenance placards are the easiest way to accomplish this. With properly designed placards, you can note which activities need to be performed when, and track who is performing these tasks. Additionally, by utilizing systems such as we have outlined, you can ensure you adhere to Sigma Six, lean manufacturing standards, and just in time. If you do not currently have a preventative maintenance schedule or if you need placards, please contact us so that we can help you through this process. And if you have any advice for companies looking to set up a preventative maintenance plan, please leave a comment.

Implementation of OSHA 1910.132

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Twitt

There are many things a business must do to maintain a safe and healthy workplace. Safety starts with a clear understanding of the hazards on the jobsite, and a clear and concise plan to manage these dangers. Next, most companies implement procedures to follow the plan; these are rules and regulations which must be followed to safeguard employees from workplace injuries. These safeguards are then checked against OSHA standards to ensure that the business is up to code and that the safety measures have maximum efficacy. The final step in any safety plan is the implementation of OSHA 1910.132, which governs the use of Personal Protective Equipment.

As we’ve discussed previously, personal protective equipment is a crucial part of any safety program. Just about every OSHA standard ends with some form of personal protective equipment, because that is the last possible safety mechanism for your employees. If every safeguard you have put in place fails, or an employee misuses a piece of equipment he does not fully understand, or you simply fail to account for a hazard in your workplace, personal protective equipment can mitigate the effects of the damage.

Because safety plans rely so heavily on personal protective equipment as that last line of defense, it is imperative that you properly document how and when this equipment is used not just in your safety manual, but also at the point of potential hazards and where equipment will be donned and doffed. This is most easily accomplished through placards and safety signs and tags.

If you have any questions about your signage, and whether or not it is up to OSHA’s standard, please contact us so we can help you verify that your business is compliant. And, should you have any needs for signage which you do not see in our store, we can design custom signs for your workspace, to ensure maximum safety for your staff. If you have anything to say about OSHA 1910.132, please leave a comment.

Safety and Health Management System

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Twitt

OSHA regulates and oversees all aspects of safety in the workplace. No matter what your line of business, there is something you are doing which OSHA has a standard for. These standards have been developed over 30 years of intensely studying workplace accidents and effective prevention methods. OSHA does not take noncompliance lightly, and you should not either.

At the heart of OSHA’s standards is the concept of a Safety and Health Management System. A Safety and Health Management System is a system you put in place to confirm compliance with OSHA. A poorly created or outdated system can lead to undertrained employees or ineffective procedures in place for handling workplace hazards. Either way, you are looking at potentially crippling fines for you and your business and unnecessary injuries to your team.

If you are concerned with the quality of your Safety and Health Management System, or if you feel it needs to be updated, don’t procrastinate – do it. It’s not fun to update it, and it’s certainly not easy but if done correctly, it can be a pretty painless process. You need to start from the beginning; assess your workplace, its hazards, and what your safety goals are. Next, examine your business objectives and find the sticking points between safety and business practicality. Then, troubleshoot how you can smooth over those issues.

If you find you are having some difficulties, that’s ok – normal, even. That’s where we come in. We can help you create and maintain a Safety and Health Management System, keeping the realities of the business world in mind. Then, we can help you maintain your Safety and Health Management System with annual audits, which will keep you up to code in the future. If you are ready to take safety seriously, and get your business up to speed, or to check to ensure your business is compliant, contact us; we would love to help. If you have anything to add, please leave a comment.

29CFR1910.147 Lockout/Tagout

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Twitt

Lockout Tagout procedures are of the utmost importance to business continuity and employee safety. It is for this reason that we have discussed it so many times on our blog already. In 2011, the standard which governs lockout tagout procedures, OSHA Standard 1910.147 The Control of Hazardous Energy, was the fourth most frequently violated standard. This standard alone accounted for almost 4,000 citations in that year. In addition, OSHA data shows that lockout/tagout noncompliance accounts for 120 fatalities and 50,000 injuries every year.

This is pretty sobering news if you are in an industry with machinery subject to lockout/tagout standards, and this list of industries is growing, as technology advances. If you are not sure if your machinery requires formal procedures with a visual placard, you need to immediately contact a professional who can better inform you about what is required of you by OSHA. And if you do need lockout/tagout procedures, and think you are up to code, it might be time to audit yourself, as most of those companies cited in 2011 thought that they were up to code, as well.

As an owner or member of management in your company, you can not leave the burden of responsibility solely on your maintenance personnel; you need to take an active role in overseeing compliance. The easiest way to do this is to routinely audit your machines and safety procedures, and consult with your maintenance staff to ensure there are no misunderstandings about the procedures.

In addition, you need to ensure that, as your machinery and uses change, your lockout/tagout needs are not changing. To do this, you need to either manually keep track of uses, surges, system downtime, and system changes, or utilize a program which can track this for you. Luckily, many companies offer such software to help you remain compliant and accident free. If you would like more information about our software, or about lockout/tagout in general, please contact us so that we may assist you. Together, we can reduce the number of injuries and citations caused by lockout/tagout procedure errors. If you have any helpful hints to help our readers avoid issues of noncompliance, please leave a comment.