A Step-By-Step Walkthrough of a Professional Machine Guarding Safety Plan

The implementation of a professional machine guarding safety plan can have an immediate and lasting impact on your business’s morale, productivity, and profitability. Many companies don’t realize the importance of workplace safety until it’s too late and they’re swamped with injuries, downtime, and fines as a result. Proactivity is key to ensure you get ahead of the risks with your equipment and create a safe environment for your workers. Businesses often forego a safety plan because they think the process is too complicated and that it will be too disruptive to their operations. What they don’t know is that it can be a painless and incredibly rewarding task. Here’s a walkthrough of everything involved in a professional machine guarding safety plan and everything that goes into making your workplace a better and safer place to be.

Step 1: Assessment

A thorough machine guarding assessment is the first step in protecting your workers and ensuring maximum productivity – in addition to keeping your business compliant and protecting you from fines or lawsuits. The safety partner you hire will start by visiting your workplace and identifying all the risks present with your equipment and documenting them in a complete and easily understood way. This information will later be used to formulate and implement an effective safety plan. A machine guarding assessment by a partner with a background in industrial workplaces will be able to pinpoint all the areas that are most likely to cause problems and put together the best possible plan to correct them. They will also be able to perform a comprehensive and thorough assessment without disrupting any of your day-to-day operations.

Step 2: Pre-design

Once all the risks with your equipment have been identified, a professional consultation is the next step to get the wheels in motion and mitigate those risks. The knowledge of risks alone is not enough to make your employees safe. A professional safety team will use that knowledge to design and engineer a plan that will minimize all risk areas pointed out during the initial machine guarding assessment while also maximizing your production. There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all safety plan. Some solutions will be simple while others will need to be highly customized. The right plan for you will depend on your environment, equipment, methods, and needs. You should be involved throughout this process to understand the reasoning behind the plan and the role you will have to play in making these changes happen.

Step 3: Implementation

After you’ve assessed the risks across all of your equipment and have formulated a specific plan for your business to mitigate those risks, you now need to bring it all together and properly implement that plan. This will involve both the installation of new safeguarding machinery and the implementation of new procedures. Too many companies outline a great plan and then never put it into place because they don’t know how or they think they don’t have time. You need to realize that safety is the most pressing issue your company faces. Your safety partner will work with you to put every aspect of your plan into place without disrupting operations. Steps will also be taken to educate your team on the new system and how it will benefit them. Depending on the safety risks present, the new plan may be implemented in phases to improve the rollout of the processes.

Stronghold Is Your Full-Service Partner

For more than 15 years, Stronghold has helped industrial workplaces become safer and more productive by engineering and implementing solutions designed specifically for their needs. It’s our job to make sure your workers arrive to work with the peace of mind knowing that they are protected. As the only company that can fully assess, engineer, and implement complete safety solutions, Stronghold is the most trusted name in machine safety. Contact us today!