How Machine Guarding Assessments Protect Your Business
June 19, 2024
How Machine Guarding Assessments Protect Your Business
Your machinery and heavy equipment are vital to production — and so is the safety of your employees. Evolving machine guarding standards can make it difficult to keep up with innovations in safety and technology.
You must maintain the quality of your machines and ensure that your employees are protected from potential risks. How do you determine what your first steps should be?
In this article, the machine safeguarding experts at Stronghold® Safety Engineering discuss the benefits of regular machine guarding assessments. Discover how they work, what they include, and how to get started, below.
Why is Machine Safety Guarding Vital for Workplace Safety?
Regular machine guarding assessments are important because they identify the potential hazards associated with your operations. In the United States, OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) requires employers to protect workers from machine-related hazards.
You must install proper safeguards to prevent contact with dangerous moving parts, falls and slips, shocks, and flying debris. Safeguarding assessments also enable you to identify areas where safety methods, awareness, or training must be improved to keep employees safe while on the job.
Which OSHA Standards Cover Safety Guards for Machines?
OSHA standard 1910.212 includes general requirements for all commercial and industrial machines. Visit our safety blog to learn more about OSHA standards on safeguarding machinery and equipment.
How Do Machine Guarding Assessments Protect Your Business?
Machine and operator safety must always remain your number one priority. Failure to conduct proper workplace safety assessments increase the risks associated with unmaintained or improperly guarded machines.
These hazards may cause accidents and injuries in the workplace — and potential fines from OSHA compliance violations. The solution to providing a safer workplace is right at your fingertips, and it starts with regular machine guarding assessments.
Conducted properly, assessments identify and recommend corrective actions for any unsafe conditions that may exist in your workplace. This empowers you to ensure compliance with applicable governmental regulations, keep your employees safe, and optimize productivity.
What are the 3 Basic Areas That Require Machine Guarding?
When it comes to safety guards, there are three basic areas of every machine that must be addressed. These include:
Point-of-Operation
Power Transmission
Operating Controls
Point-of-Operation
The Point-of-Operation is the area of a machine or equipment where the work is performed. It's the area that poses the greatest risk to an operator, and thus needs to be properly guarded with safety systems.
These systems will help protect against accidental contact with moving parts or other hazards. Point-of-operation guards must be designed in such a way that it does not create new hazards or pose any additional risks to operators.
The most common types of point-of-operation guards are physical barriers, two-handed devices, presence sensing devices, and interlock systems. It's important for employers to regularly inspect their machines and take corrective action where necessary.
Power Transmission
Power transmission involves supplying your equipment with energy. These components include belts, pulleys, electric motors, pneumatic systems, hydraulic components, and other parts that generate power.
Machine safety assessments identify the physical and electrical safeguarding solutions that improve your operations. This reduces the risk of electric shock, crush injuries, or worse.
Operating Controls
The operating controls do just as they advertise: enable your employees to operate the machinery. The most important safeguard, from OSHA’s perspective, is to empower your operators to cut power to the machine at the press of a button.
This button must be easily accessible during operation to ensure that operations cease in the event of an emergency. An anti-restart motor control further guarantees that the machine won’t restart until safeguards have been replaced.
Why Implement Regular Machine Guarding Assessments?
Eliminating risks before they lead to injury is vital for industrial workplaces to protect their employees and maximize productivity. The first step to building a safer workplace and identifying these risks is a machine guarding assessment from Stronghold® Safety Engineering.
Through this assessment, we determine where your manufacturing equipment is out of compliance with existing safety standards. Then, we design and implement a customized machine safety remediation plan to protect your employees and deliver maximum ROI.
A machine guarding assessment is about more than just compliance.
It’s about empowering you to determine whether your machines are able to operate safely on a daily basis according to your production needs. Don’t wait until you receive a citation or an operator becomes injured on the job to change your safety habits.
A complete and detailed safety assessment prevents injuries proactively, decreasing downtime and avoiding losses in production. Never compromise the safety of your employees by postponing safety assessments.
Safety assessments are imperative to ensuring a secure and productive workplace. An assessment from Stronghold® will identify risks, helping you understand your options for safeguarding in your facilities..
What Does a Machine Guarding Assessment Include?
At Stronghold®, we don’t want to overwhelm you with complex documents, or leave you unsure of what to do next. Our process is detailed but easy to understand, giving you the tools to make the right follow-up decisions.
When we assess your machines and equipment, we determine compliance and risk based on:
OSHA Regulations
Industry Standards
Company-Specific Guarding Standards
Recognized Hazards
Once we complete our assessment, we deliver a comprehensive machine safeguarding report. The report identifies each piece of equipment that requires your attention, includes our observations on the machine safety or compliance issues, and ranks the risk to enable you to determine what to prioritize in your safety plan.
The 3 Factors of Potential Machine Safety Hazards
Identifying machine guarding requirements requires us to determine the potential for risk associated with each of your machines. We determine the potential risk of each machine based on three key factors:
Frequency of Use
Probability of Injury
Severity of Harm
As your full-service safety consultant, we never deliver the assessment and leave you to determine what to do next. Instead, we walk you through each part of the assessment to ensure that you understand the best options for creating a safety plan that secures your workplace against risk.
Then, we help you to create your custom plan to achieve a safer and more fully compliant workplace that strengthens your business.
Find Reliable Machine Guard Solutions at Stronghold Safety
At Stronghold Safety Engineering, we understand that your machines and equipment are vital to supporting your bottom line. Even more important, however, is the safety of your workers.
Through our machine guarding assessments, you can prevent machine accidents and eliminate risks. Safer workplaces improve productivity, too — so by investing in high-quality safety solutions, you’ll drive greater ROI for your business.
To build a custom turnkey machine protection system for your operations, reach out to our team today.