How Factories and Industrial Companies can Improve Safety

Assembly and production are not safe industries, nor are they easy ones. Safety will always be an issue. However, there are ways to reduce the occurrences of issues. One of those ways is by improving conditions by reducing the wear on the equipment. This can be achieved through wear plate products and solutions such as those made by AJ Weller Corporation.  

The composite technology used by AJ Weller means that there will be a reduction in downtime as well as a service life that is prolonged, lower costs for operation and, as a result, higher margin for each unit produced. This particular technology merges a variety of materials into different applications and this results in more costly materials only being used in critical areas.

Common Safety Violations

For company directors and owners who are looking to avoid costly lawsuits as well as those who are striving to prevent their employees from getting injured, it is always a good thing to learn what the most often seen violations are. Some of them include things like:

• Protection from falls
• Standards in the communication of hazards
• Scaffolding
• Powered industrial trucks
• Electrical components
• Machinery and machine guarding

photo David Peña via pixabay

Improving Safety

There are ways to improve safety, though. One of those ways is to delegate responsibility. Workers tend to respond more when they happen to be the ones who make the protocols. Assign a point person to the factory floor for safety while also making safe practices a criterion that is reviewable. 

Sometimes the System Needs to be Fixed

More traditional safety management tends to view the employee as the issue. This goes all the way back to the 1930s. That means that normal safety programs shape up like this:

• Management is responsible for setting safety procedures and policies
• Once employees get hired, they are trained on said procedures and policies
• Supervisors monitor workers to prevent actions that aren’t safe
• Inspections locate and correct safety issues
• Managers set safety goals that are tough
• Each accident is investigated and followed up with corrective actions
• Incentives are used to keep morale high and motivate employees.

However, this system, as it is, does not work. There are quite a few reasons for this. Some of them include the fact that control rests with the supervisor, encouraging the ‘leave your brain at home’ syndrome. Another issue with this is that while much time goes into learning what happened and who to blame after an incident, nothing is done to correct what caused it in the first place.

Safety Management

There is no doubt that this can be a kind of touchy subject for any business. Disagreements will be had. There will be questions regarding whether or not that company should use behavior based safety controls or more of a systems approach. You can also run into the question regarding how safety should be driven – by employees or management. Also, what metrics should be in place to assess the process of safety?

All of those are valid questions and arguments can be made for each side. The thing is, you need to decide which will be best for your business and stick to it. The answers might be found by testing a number of different things. The important thing is to find the answers to the questions and get that safety system in place now.

Author: Jimmy Simond