Plant Services - September 2007 - (Page 39) MANAGEMENT Safety everyone in the plant. “Goals, resources and systems depend on leadership and management. Workers who are most at risk have to feel that commitment from the top – that they can raise an issue with their supervisor,” says Floyd. “But leadership doesn’t have all the answers. ey need help to know what’s going on with technology and training,” and on the plant floor. Suggestion systems help management see ways to improve safety, “and ways to be equally safe but at lower cost are equally important,” Floyd says, “But there also must be ways to deal with immediate problems – urgent items.” Maintenance and engineering often are the critical links between recognizing a hazardous situation and implementing a solution. eir talents also are critical on the safety committee, and as part of any incident investigation. “Maintenance should be involved in the safety committee partly because, by nature, they ask, ‘What went wrong?’” says Mims. “ ey’re good problem solvers and talented at identifying system problems.” “Maintenance is key to everything,” Rhoden adds. “If Maintenance is not your friend, you’re not going to get anything done.” Behavior makes the di erence Touring a facility can give some idea of a company’s safety competence, and employee behavior reveals the rest of the story. “Every company has a safety culture, good or bad,” says Anderson. “ ose companies that truly excel have a culture of safety where each person believes in safety, not just complies, and takes personal responsibility for their own safety as well as the safety of those around them. For example, consider the case of two men are working on a platform more than 6 ft. off the ground, and one of the men unhooks his fall protection and continues working. “In a culture of safety, his partner stops him immediately and has a safety conversation with him,” says Anderson. “In a bad safety culture, his partner ignores it because the person S does it all the time and nothing has ever happened before.” Or a case where a welder observes a supervisor walking through a work area wearing only head protection where eye and head protection must be worn at all times. If the supervisor has fostered a culture of safety, where everyone is accountable for speaking up, the welder quickly walks over to him and has a safety conversation. e supervisor thanks him for caring about his safety. Elsewhere, the welder ignores him because he’s a supervisor and, besides, last time he said something the supervisor told him to mind his own business and get back to work. In the safe plant’s monthly senior management meeting, the fi rst thing the president of the company tells the team is what he or she intends to do the following month to continually reinforce their culture of safety, then asks each team member what they will do. e less-safe plant? “What, are you kidding?” Anderson says. “Safety is never even discussed at this level of the company; they only focus on last month’s profit.” Hornbeck tells of the Tier 1 supplier of die-cast alternator cases he saw exposing operators to molten metal. “ ey say it’s been that way for years and they aren’t going to do anything about it,” he says. “ ey’re surviving on luck.” He visited a stamping plant and saw a number of safety controls on just one of a set of otherwise identical machines. Why only the one? ey said, “Somebody got hurt on that one and OSHA made us upgrade it.” One of the saddest situations occurs when safety installations and upgrades are rendered ineffective by uninformed design or misuse. “More than 90% of the machines on factory floors we’ve assessed are not guarded or they are guarded incorrectly,” says Peabody. “Companies spend money and get a false sense of security, and operators bypass them.” e two main underlying causes are misapplication of technology and in.PLANTSERVICES. Shaft alignment in a Flash® New! Measure and correct for dynamic growth in a Flash. Now, when you add the patented “OL2R” (offline-to-running) hardware+software expansion kit to the revolutionary XA alignment system, you can measure the dynamic movement of critical machines as they reach operating conditions from a cold start. The resulting data is stored in the XA and is readily accessible to automatically adjust future alignments. Onscreen animated graphics make accurate alignments of critical machines fast and easy. www.vibralign.com 800-379-2250 Flash is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated. 39 http://www.vibralign.com http://www.PLANTSERVICES.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.