No task is so urgent it cannot be done safely and reliably because any injury or equipment failure is preventable. Employers are responsible for providing a safe and reliable workplace, but everyone is responsible for upholding the integrity of the workplace standards for preventing injuries and failures. You can have excellent personnel safety and still have a major accident. Safety is improved by disciplined operating and maintenance practices. Take the following steps to learn how you can achieve higher workplace safety and productivity standards today!
Step 1: Aim for Zero Risk
If you believe in zero instance in injuries you must believe in zero failures and unplanned downtime. That may seem unrealistic, but it is the first step towards setting an aspirational goal. That is where you're going. You're going to work really hard to get there and you're going to do what you need to do to move in that direction. It’s important to note that the operations and maintenance training should be on a par with your safety training, as typically they are not. Getting both reliability and safety to their full potential requires operational discipline and the tenacious use of this practice in all areas.
Step 2: Start From Scratch
The most common excuse for not investing in safety and reliability is “budget”. You probably think you don’t have it because you think you need millions of dollars. You don’t have to start big just to start. Pick something, any machine, and make it right. When you've got that one done, pick another and make it right. Next, pick a procedure. Make it right. It's a gradual process but over the course of a year or two you'll start to build credibility and you'll start to get leadership on board with doing more. This is about a change in mindset, a change in the approach to engage in the workforce and set higher disciplinary standards for the workforce itself, higher expectations, and then supporting them meeting that expectations. All this is really a question of leadership.
Step 3: Engagement & Alignment
Eliminating small day-to-day problems has a much bigger impact on results then focusing on the major failures. Engaged employees are three times more productive than average. Most organizations are not aligned, engaging, or helping their employees do a better job. Focus on the high-level goals and think at a systems level. Develop shared measures between competing groups and partnership agreements so you are more likely to work together. You have to have clear goals that are reasonably achievable.
The Predictive Approach Condition Monitoring
With condition monitoring, we want to understand the degradation process so we can avoid or minimize the consequence of failure so we're monitoring. We hear a squeak or a noise, we let that go too long and it becomes a functional failure and beyond that it very quickly deteriorates until it is completely broken. That time interval in between potential and functional failure is the time we have to take action to plan and schedule or to mitigate the failure or to avoid the failure altogether.
Experience higher workplace safety and productivity with continuous remote temperature monitoring. The GraceSense™ Hot Spot Monitor will continuously monitor temperature at your critical connection points in equipment such as switchgears. You'll immediately get alerted when the temperature drops below or rises above your programmed thresholds, indicating there may be a problem that could lead to costly downtime.Don't wait until your periodic inspection to find out there's a problem you could have fixed a long time ago. Learn more about the Hot Spot Monitor today!
In other news, our Chief Technology Officer, Andy Zimmerman, was recently a guest on the Empowering Pumps & Equipment podcast. Andy discusses the importance of predictive maintenance and the Industrial Internet of Things. Get to know what Andy does on a daily basis and how his background landed him in the IIoT space at Grace Technologies (interview starts at 25:10). Check it out below!
About Empowering Industry Podcast: Empowering Pumps & Equipment is the information and connection hub for pump and related equipment industries and has been for the past 9 years. Their mission is to connect, inform and educate, and we are launching a weekly podcast to compliment their existing digital and print platforms.
Stay SAFE and have a have a GREAT week!
