Your biggest responsibility as a business owner is to provide your employees with a safe work environment. That means making sure that machinery operates smoothly and workers perform tasks correctly. To achieve this and more, hire a safety consultant for your Toronto company.
Although machine safety consultants focus on all equipment, they particularly pay close attention to machines with moving parts. If machinery is safeguarded properly, the workers who operate the machinery can not get injured. Sometimes, a safety issue has to do with machinery, and other times, it’s the process.
The Role of Safety Consulting Engineers
Assessment and risk reduction are the two primary objectives of these engineers. Here’s a breakdown of what each of these entails.
Assessment
This refers to an analysis performed by a safety consultant in Toronto. This expert identifies obvious and potential risks associated with the machines your company uses. They break this process down into three steps. These include determining a machine’s limitations, identifying hazards, and estimating the risks.
- Machine’s Limitations – When machine safety consultants complete this step, they find out and document specific information. That includes how machinery gets used, who operates it and for what length of time, and its lifecycle.
- Identifying Hazards – The second step consists of confirming hazardous situations. For this, safety consulting engineers identify events that could cause an accident whereby someone could sustain an injury. Of the three steps, this is the most critical.
- Estimating the Risks – The safety consultant that you hire in Toronto will compare the various hazardous situations they identified.
Risk Reduction
With the assessment phase done, machine safety consultants move on to risk reduction. For this, they focus on the severity of the hazard and the probability of a hazard occurring. This too consists of three steps.
First is the frequency and duration of exposure to the identified hazard. Second is the probability that a hazardous event will occur. The third is the possibility of preventing or reducing the effects of a hazard.
- Frequency and Duration – The leading machine safety consultants use the data collected during the assessment to identify several things. They look at the time a worker stays in the danger zone and how they complete the task. They also determine the frequency of a worker accessing the area, among other things.
- Probability of a Hazard Occurring – For this step, safety consulting engineers determine the odds of a hazardous situation happening. To accomplish that, they look at the operator’s skill, awareness of a potential risk, and responses to a possible threat.
- Preventing or Reducing the Effects – In this last step, consultants rely on their overall expertise, including experience, education, and knowledge. They first determine if a risk is something a worker can tolerate. If not, they come up with solutions that align with current safety standards for businesses in Ontario.
Create the Safest Work Environment Possible
At S.A.F.E. Engineering, Inc., we have amazingly talented machine safety consultants. To get details out our services, give us a call.