How a Machine Guarding Assessment Can Help Your Business
June 19, 2024
How a Machine Guarding Assessment Can Help Your Business
It’s easy to understand the benefits a safe work environment can have on your business, but implementing such procedures can often be a much greater challenge. There is a wide range of factors and highly specialized techniques to consider in creating a more productive, profitable, and comfortable work environment for your employees. A machine guarding assessment is among the first steps in this process and provides an effective starting point for the rest of the journey. Here’s how this key stage of safety implementation can help your business.
What is a machine guarding assessment?
A machine guarding assessment is a detailed safety evaluation designed to uncover risk areas within your workplace that could potentially be hazardous or non-compliant. This is the first of three steps within the greater safety process, followed by risk reduction consulting and remediation services, both of which are largely impacted by the findings of the machine guarding assessment. These services aren’t just designed to help you be compliant. They’re also designed to help your business as a whole.
What are the benefits of a machine guarding assessment?
The safety implementation process is designed to protect everything important to your business and to prevent accidents that could cause injury, hamper production, or cost you money down the road. The machine guarding assessment does a great job of identifying any factors that could hurt these three areas, but it doesn’t stop there. It also gives you guidance on ways to improve them so you can help your business.
On-site injuries lead to lost work, money spent on future prevention or legal issues, and a negative impact on your company reputation. No one wants to work for a business whose employees are at risk, and both current and prospective employees will take note when considering career advancement. Production also takes a hit as a result of injury and can hurt your bottom line significantly. It’s important to get ahead of these issues and keep them from damaging your company in ways that may not be reversible. A machine guarding assessment lets you get in front of all these issues before they become a problem.
Let’s take a closer look at the assessment phase itself and how it is properly executed.
What goes on during a machine guarding assessment?
It’s first important to note that this is not a simple, one-size-fits-all assessment merely designed to keep your business minimally compliant. Many factors are taken into consideration to help determine where safety may be lacking and how to keep your employees in the best possible environment.
A properly executed assessment will evaluate compliance and risk based on:
OSHA regulations
Industry standards
Company-specific guarding standards
Recognized standards
By ensuring your business is in line with industry guidelines, an assessment will ultimately save you time and money that might otherwise be lost to fines or inspections. More importantly, the assessment will help protect your employees by keeping them safe on the job.
A machine guarding assessment also determines the potential risk of each individual machine based on:
Frequency of use
Probability of injury
Severity of harm
These factors all have their own effect on equipment safety and none of them should be taken lightly. It’s important the machine guarding assessment is thorough and conducted by a highly certified team.
What happens next?
After the assessment, you should receive a company-specific report tailored just for your business that documents each piece of equipment with corresponding observations, machine safety or compliance issues, and a risk ranking to help prioritize the best possible safety plan. At Stronghold Safety, we provide detailed results you can understand and look ahead from the identification phase to begin designing and implementing the right safety strategies.
Our Experts Can Help
With more than 15 years of experience helping industrial workplaces become safer and more productive, Stronghold is here to provide machine guarding assessments that will help your business maximize its efficiency and protect its employees. We mitigate risks with the right safeguards that offer the best protection without getting in the way of the job. And we’re the only company that can fully assess, design, and implement machine safety solutions to ensure your people are protected and your bottom line is flourishing.
Contact us today for a machine guarding assessment that will detail the best overall safety plan for your business.