Safety Technology - Industrial safety gets a bad rap as being a detriment to productivity. But what if you could use safety to better understand and improve the performance of your operations?
Smart safety can help you do just that. It uses the same concepts as smart manufacturing or Industry 4.0—such as seamless connectivity and real-time analytics—and extends them to your industrial safety efforts. This can help you not only better monitor and manage your safety performance, but also transform your operations in other ways.
By connecting safety devices into your operations and giving workers more insights into those devices, you can boost productivity, identify and resolve common machine-stoppage problems, and even predict production issues before they happen.
Smart safety devices allow you to access safety data that until now wasn’t being generated or couldn’t be extracted from your systems. The data can give you valuable insights into key aspects of your operations, such as where safety-related failures are occurring, if workers are following standard operating procedures and if machines are nearing failure.
You can then put these insights to work in several ways to help improve production:
- Uncover production issues.
- Reduce safety-related downtime.
- Realize predictive maintenance.
- Reduce wiring.
- Speed up troubleshooting.
- Ease regulatory compliance.
ISO 45001 - A safety management system provides a structured approach that enables an organization to control its occupational health and safety risks and improve performance. ISO 45001 is an international safety management system standard. It is the product of a project committee, representing 58 countries, to establish a common, global safety management system that is consistent in steps and language with the current environmental and quality management system. The final standard was published on March 15, 2018.
ISO 45001 includes some very important improvements over OHSAS 18001, including greater emphasis on workers and their participation.
Other improvements include an enhanced approach to managing the health and safety of contractors and making health and safety part of the purchasing decision-making process. There’s greater emphasis on leadership participation, change management and performance management.
True implementation of a structured approach to managing health and safety means implementing a system and not a standard. Organizations that implement a standard tend to focus on compliance and not the effectiveness. The true value of ISO 45001 comes from linking the business strategy and the health and safety management system—not developing a standalone set of documents.
Using ISO 45001 to help manage risks and contractors, core and support processes, equipment and people gives you the opportunity not only to control but to assess and improve the health and safety of workers and others. Certification to ISO 45001 gives you the opportunity to identify improvements and further reduce the risk of injury, illness and death.
Workplace Bullying/Violence - If your company doesn’t have a program to eliminate employee bullying, you need to start one right away. Developments over the last several years guarantee that if you don’t do it, you face the possibility of paying a steep price in government penalties and employee lawsuits, and the stiff legal costs associated with them.
Workplace bullying can endanger employee safety, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires employers to maintain an anti-bullying policy. This comes from OSHA’s authority under the OSH Act’s “General Duties” clause, which requires employers to maintain a safe workplace for their workers.
Bullying, harassment and violence (BHV) are safety issues in the workplace, even though they normally fall to human resource departments.
What ends as a violent act starts out slowly as incivility, or the intent to harm a worker. Negative interactions or jabs at someone could be brushed off as a cultural norm at the workplace. However, this could escalate to hazing or harassment and potentially to a physical act.
Prevention, training and programs fall into a company’s safety management system (SMS). Daniels outlined steps a safety professional should take:
- Recognize bullying, harassment and violence as a safety hazard in the group or organization.
- Establish a plan to address the hazard that includes processes for reporting.
- Provide training to members of the organization at the awareness, supervisor and management level.
- Integrate into the organization’s SMS.
Opioids/Substance Abuse- Driven by increases in cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana, drug use by the American workforce remains at its highest rate in more than a decade, according to analysis by Quest Diagnostics.
Nationally, the positivity rate for the combined U.S. workforce held steady at 4.2% in 2017, the same as in 2016, but a dramatic increase over the 3.5% positivity rate from 2012, which represented a thirty-year low. The analysis of 2017 data also suggests shifting patterns of drug use, with cocaine and amphetamines positivity surging in some areas of the country and marijuana positivity rising sharply in states with newer recreational use statutes.
Prescription opiate positivity rates declined dramatically on a national basis.
“Not only have declines appeared to have bottomed out, but also in some drug classes and areas of the country drug positivity rates are increasing,” said Barry Sample, PhD, senior director, science and technology, Quest Diagnostics. “These changing patterns and geographical variations may challenge the ability of employers to anticipate the ‘drug of choice’ for their workforce or where to best focus their drug prevention efforts to ensure a safe and healthy work environment.”
Nationally, the positivity rate for opiates in the general U.S. workforce in urine drug testing declined 17% between 2016 and 2017 (0.47% versus 0.39%).
Overall, marijuana positivity continued its five-year upward trajectory in urine testing for both the general U.S. workforce and the federally-mandated, safety-sensitive workforce. Marijuana positivity increased four percent in the general U.S. workforce (2.5% in 2016 versus 2.6% in 2017) and nearly eight percent in the safety-sensitive workforce (0.78% versus 0.84%).
Gamification of Training- Most manufacturers are now looking at a workforce that is 35% Millennials—the generation born between 1981 and 1996. According to Pew Research Center, Millennials became the largest generational group in the U.S. labor force in 2016, when they overtook Gen Xers. In 2017, 56 million Millennials were working or looking for work.
And, since the Baby Boomers are retiring in droves, this number is only going to grow. Millennials are expected to be 75% of the workforce by 2025.
This younger workforce needs to be trained—they are graduating without many of the skills needed for manufacturing jobs—but the traditional talking head and paper manual training programs their parents sat through won’t work with Generation Y.
Millennials and later generations were born into a digital world. (These days, by the time the average American has turned 21, they’ve spent 6,000 to 9,000 hours playing video games, but only about 2,000 hours reading books). They’ve been fed on video games, and it means they learn and play differently from older generations. Millennials are totally comfortable with technology, and research has shown that they crave variety in media and are born multitasks; so they can’t just sit and listen to a talking head, the way earlier generations used to.
Intuitively, it makes sense for training programs to use games, since Millennial brains are already working that way. The “gamification of training” means using game design techniques in a non-game situation to engage users and reinforce a specific skill or concept. Training games use techniques from the game world like rewards, points, badges, frequent feedback, progression through many levels, etc., to make training more effective by making learning more fun.
Silica Enforcement- The new silica regulation imposed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) limiting employee exposure to crystalline silica may be detailed and complex, but the agency takes compliance seriously and is not expected to cut an employer any slack if caught violating the rule
The rule went into effect on June 23 for most employers but was imposed on Oct. 23, 2017, on the construction industry, where OSHA believes most worker exposure to silica takes place.
Under the new standard, the permissible exposure limit now limits worker exposures to 50 micrograms of respirable crystalline silica per cubic meter of air, averaged over an eight-hour day.
Crystalline silica is in many natural materials that are commonly found in many industrial products and at construction sites, including sand, concrete, stone and mortar. Silica also is used to make products like glass, pottery, ceramics, bricks, concrete and artificial stone. It also is contained in industrial sand and is used in certain foundry work and hydraulic fracking operations.
When it announced the rule, OSHA estimated that 2.3 million workers are exposed to silica when they are at work. It also supported the proposed changes by citing epidemiological studies showing a strong link between silica exposure and lung cancer in at least 10 industries.
OSHA said it was expected to prevent 600 deaths a year from silica-related diseases—such as silicosis, lung cancer, other respiratory diseases and kidney disease—and to prevent more than 900 new cases of silicosis each year.
Cyber security- Safety and cyber security are interconnected in the manufacturing environment. Security breaches can trip systems that stop machinery or alert operators in the event of a problem, damaging equipment, placing people at risk—even causing environmental calamities.
Yet at many manufacturers, safety and information technology teams do not effectively collaborate.
“If you discover vulnerability in IT, you patch it and move on,” said Steve Ludwig, safety programs manager for Rockwell Automation. “On the [operations technology] side, that’s not the case. We need more education in the engineering community about OT risks.”
Safety-related security breaches can occur when:
Employees or contractors inadvertently plug an infected machine into the system; connect to an unsecure network; or download the wrong program.
Disgruntled current or former employees, knowing the ins and outs of a system, break in and cause damage.
Hackers break into an operations system for financial, competitive, or political reasons.
State-sponsored spies target critical infrastructure and production systems to disrupt operations or steal secrets.
Cybercriminals seek to disrupt, infect or shut down critical infrastructure, from nuclear plants to water supplies and oil refineries.
EHS, operations and IT teams should work together to identify safety data requirements for operations systems and develop a risk-management strategy for security threats and vulnerabilities, as well as their potential implications on safety.
A safety assessment looks at not only standard operator functions but all human-machine interactions, including machine setup, maintenance, cleaning and sanitation, as well as training and administrative requirements. In addition, companies should expand their traditional scope of this assessment and look at potential cyber-attack risk.
Connected Vehicles- If you have or know a child in elementary school or younger, chances are they might never be involved in a motor vehicle crash in their lives, thanks to technology.
“The United States is the world leader in the deployment of connected technology,” said Michael Pina, program manager at the U.S. Department of Transportation. “Pretty much everyone in the world is waiting to see research.”
The federal government has provided cities across the country with millions of dollars to study and implement new vehicle features. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that connected vehicles have the potential to reduce crashes by 80%.
Connected vehicles communicate with one another, traffic signals or even cell phones in order to reduce crashes and pedestrian accidents. Pina explained how they work in the following three steps:
- A wireless device in a car sends basic safety messages 10 times per second.
- Other nearby cars and roadside equipment receive the messages.
- Drivers get a warning of a potential crash.
Some features that are being tested or will become standard in the next few years include:
- Intersection Movement Assist
- Red Light Violation Warning
- Curve Speed Warning
- Work Zone Warning
- Transit Bus Stop Pedestrian Warning
- Mobile Accessible Pedestrian Signal System
- Pedestrian in Signalized Crosswalk.
Exoskeletons- Shoulder and back injuries along with general fatigue, are quietly stealing worker quality of life and plant productivity. They’re problems screaming for a solution, and by all accounts, industrial exoskeletons are the best answer.
Since 2012, Boeing has explored industrial exoskeletons. Portrayed in sci-fi movies as super-powered suits, these wearable tools offer very real solution to the overexertion injury epidemic surreptitiously stealing company productivity and workers’ health.
Just as stealthily, several start-ups have gone into full production on these lightweight wearable support devices that cost less than $5,000 and promise to restore what a hard day’s work should earn: a decent quality of life.
Building, assembling, or moving anything often requires awkward static postures, repetition of movement, and overexertion. Over time, these increase the likelihood of tissue micro fissures and musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). And these injuries are equal opportunity offenders.
MSDs accounted for one-third of all non-fatal workplace injuries in 2014, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The 2017 Liberty Mutual Workplace Safety Index puts the direct cost for overexertion injuries at $13.8 billion. In 2007, it was $1.5 billion, according to the CDC.
Robot Safety- While there is no OSHA regulations that specifically address robot safety at present, that doesn’t mean the agency won’t come after an employer when an accident involving a robot occurs.
OSHA’s Lockout/Tagout (LOTO) and other regulations require employers to protect employees from unexpected energization of machinery by, among other things, making sure all sources of energy are dissipated when the machines are not in use and installing a lock to prevent accidental start-up.
When it comes to robots, the primary source of protection from unexpected movement is a programmable logic controller (PLC). Under OSHA’s rules, PLCs are expected to limit robots from moving when not performing their pre-programmed tasks and functions, or if a certain condition is met—such as when an interlocked door is open.
While these PLC devices typically “fail to safe,” OSHA has been reluctant to accept them as equally effective means of employee protection along the lines of machine guarding or LOTO, according to the law firm.
To help employers, OSHA has created an online technical manual for employers to learn about the hazards associated with robotics and automated machinery, including those that stem from malfunctions or errors in programming or interfacing with peripheral equipment.
Source: https://www.ehstoday.com/safety/top-10-safety-trends-2018
