When a Professional Engineer performs an Industrial Safety Audit he or she will make recommendations that could have a profound effect on the overall operating performance of the machine.
This is particularly true when the Industrial Safety Audit determines that there are compliance issues that need to be addressed. Corrections often involve the redesign of the safety control system. It may also involve the installation of additional guards.
These elements of the safety control system will determine, in part, how the machine is operated. By adding machine guarding and changing the safety control system, you are changing the machine’s working path and procedures.
The questions are, do these changes make the machine compliant? Do these changes make the machine more user-friendly? Are these changes making the Machine more operationally efficient?
To ensure that this is the case, the recommended changes to the Industrial Safety Audit need to be implemented in collaboration with people who know the operation of the machine best. These are usually the staff of the Machine Operator and Maintenance personnel in any organization. Developing these approaches as a team of professional Safety Design Engineering also ensures that the system is more operationally efficient than if it does not have a safety guard at all. If machine guarding can lock in the best working direction, then we are creating standard work. This standardization of work is the foundation of the ideals of lean manufacturing.
Building an optimal standard working route with machine guarding in Ontario would reduce human error, operational error, and product variability. It, in addition, has a positive effect on scrap prices and the quality of the product.
Machine guarding protection is being introduced in Ontario. It has been discovered that, after many Industrial Safety Audits, people instinctively work faster and with more trust and confidence around equipment that had protective solutions such as machine guarding. The guarded machine is safe and secure. We work better and faster on the machine that we trust.
This is the best way to follow up on an Industrial Safety Audit that identifies compliance issues.
