Embedding a Safety Culture at Industrial and Manufacturing Firms Should Be a Narrative That Many Types of Vendors Can Readily Get Behind

By Michael Larner | 4Q 2024 | IN-7575

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ABI Research's Ensuring Worker Safety with EHS Software report (AN-5853) outlined the hazards and frequency of incidents that occur at industrial and manufacturing facilities. Legislation and regulations cover issues that contribute to accidents such as distracting noise levels, vibrations, handling hazardous materials, and performing tasks in confined spaces. Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) software is an effective compliance tool for logging incidents and risks.

To improve the safety of their facilities, Industrial and Manufacturing (I&M) firms need to embed a culture around safety. The topic must be more than compliance and a tick box exercise. Innovations in EHS software help in this regard and, alongside a broader set of technologies, can further reduce the likelihood of incidents.

Fines from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) certainly concentrate minds-they hurt the bottom line and the firm's reputation. Improving safety can take many forms, including basic things like warning signs or checklists focusing on how to perform tasks and conduct yourself in the facility.

However, to successfully embed a culture around safety, the topic shouldn't only be the domain of a safety manager or EHS director with programs dictated to staff; rather, it should be a mix of guidelines, standards, and expectations in conjunction with input and ideas from across the organization. Risk assessments, for example, shouldn't just be performed periodically, but the culture should encourage everyone to identify issues and look to get them resolved. These measures raise employee morale and should become part of a continuous improvement program. Metrics such as Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) and Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR) should become part of the organization's language around safety.

These steps are part of improving safety day to day, but I&M firms also need to have evacuation plans in the event of fires and natural disasters. Planning for these events should be the domain of those responsible for safety.

I&M firms should start with deciding on the standard or behavior related to safety that their organization is trying to avoid, remove, or improve. Following those decisions, I&M firms need to devise metrics and then determine how technologies can support the process.

Two examples could be that machine guards are in place or that staff are wearing the appropriate attire for performing the tasks (goggles, gloves, hard hats in the applicable areas). Technologies to support those standards or behaviors include cameras scanning the equipment or people entering certain areas of the facility. The images can be analyzed with machine vision tools to identify discrepancies and communicate non-compliance to other applications or devices. Another use case for machine vision is scanning lanyards to verify staff are authorized to be in a certain areas, especially applicable where hazardous materials are in use.

Even if a machine guard is in place correctly, the equipment might not be used correctly, increasing the likelihood of a safety incident. While training is important for onboarding staff and improving productivity, safety should also be a priority. Training programs should cover safely operating a piece of equipment, correctly lifting a part or assembling a component, and moving around the facility (especially those with hazardous materials, extreme temperatures, and/or mobile robots as features of the working environment). I&M firms can incorporate safety into worker instruction programs delivered by Augmented Reality (AR) or training software. The objectives are to reduce/eliminate incidents and improve the LTIR.

Safety should also be a key aspect of condition-based monitoring, as well as predictive maintenance initiatives, as equipment performing outside of acceptable boundaries can present safety risks to operators. Vendors should position their solutions as supporting safety initiatives, not just uptime and productivity.

Industrial robots, Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), and Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) present safety risks for employees. Vendors offering connectivity and asset tracking solutions that can monitor the movements of the robots supporting intralogistics use cases should emphasize collision avoidance as a benefit of deploying the solutions. For use cases where the staff are often in the vicinity of robots supporting the production line, vendors should promote geofencing and real-time shutdowns if staff get too close. Furthermore, vendors and I&M firms will need to appreciate privacy regulations in different countries or regions when looking to track/identify staff, despite the objective being to ensure their safety.

In addition, safety needs to be a consideration when redesigning factory layouts with regard to the ergonomics of assembly processes and having staff working in confined spaces for extended periods of time. This aspect of safety should be examined when considering either a brownfield or greenfield facility.

ABI Research's Ensuring Worker Safety with EHS Software report (AN-5853) outlines the shift in EHS solutions from incident recording tools to being part of embedding a safety culture. The solutions harness a mobile device's camera for collecting and uploading images or for note taking. As in other contexts, a growing safety culture will result in growth in the data collected from the factory floor and drive investments by I&M firms to make sense and create safety-related plans based on the findings.

Safety is part reactive (making the investments to reduce the impact of incidents) and part proactive, with potential risks identified and resolved. Vendors should include the role of their solutions, ensuring a safe working environment and the individual safety priorities and metrics the organization is trying to achieve when outlining the Return on Investment (ROI) that a customer can achieve.