In the occupational safety and health arena, the most important regulatory agency is OSHA.
OSHA sets standards for just about everything relating to employee health and safety, and
OSHA will inspect facilities of companies where there is the potential for workplace injury or
illness. Some violations are more or less severe than others. Chief among severe is lockout
tagout. OSHA heavily monitors, and heavily fines, companies which have a lockout tagout
deficiency.
Lockout tagout is monitored by OSHA Standard 1910.147. This standard is difficult to
understand, and can be a nightmare to implement. But beyond the initial implementation, it can
be extremely difficult to monitor and maintain because there are so many moving parts. For
instance, every time you upgrade or change your machinery, you need to update your
procedures. The same holds true with changing the layout of the facility, changing personnel,
changing locations, or basically making any superficial or cosmetic changes to your company
layout.
For this reason, many companies which established excellent lockout tagout procedures have
violations when they are audited later in the future. This is because the once accurate procedures
simply do not work with the current workplace.
Fortunately, there is a scalable, fully customizable, online accessible program which can help
you maintain and monitor your lockout tagout procedures. Our Factory Solutions Software is a
tool which allows you to upload your current lockout tagout procedures, or create new ones from
our procedure library, and then update it as often as is necessary. It also monitors OSHA policy
changes, and will alert you if something needs to be updated.
If you have any questions about monitoring lockout tagout procedures or about our Factory
Solutions software, please contact us. If you have anything to add about lockout tagout
procedures, please leave a comment.
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