North America's largest metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing event heads to Orange County Convention Center in October 2024. FABTECH provides a convenient "one stop shop" venue where you can meet with world-class suppliers, see the latest industry products and developments, and find the tools to improve productivity, increase profits and discover new solutions to all of your metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing needs.
North America's Largest Metal Forming, Fabricating, Welding and Finishing Event
The following guest blog post comes from Smartware Group. They remind us that What’s up this Wednesday (or, in this special feature’s case, this Friday) – and every day of the week – is the serious business of keeping workers and the workplace safe. In their post, Paul Lachance, president and chief technology officer for Smartware Group – the producer of Bigfoot CMMS – offers a preview of his talk for this year’s FABTECH show on “Securing Work Safety, OSHA Standards with Better Maintenance Management.”
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Preventive maintenance is the key principle that every company must adhere to whether the goal is to avoid costly downtime from equipment breakdowns – or the even higher cost to human life from workplace accidents.
When it comes to securing workplace safety, there are two facts of life to keep in mind:
1) True workplace safety comes from internal audits and unflagging preventive maintenance.
2) As far as complying with government safety regulations, if it’s not documented, it didn’t happen!
Fortunately, one potent tool can help address both of these issues, and that tool is a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS). A modern CMMS can be used in several ways to make it easier to meet the twin challenge of keeping the workplace safe and providing the documentation needed when company auditors or OSHA inspectors come to call.
First – CMMS has long been recognized for automating preventive maintenance tasks (PMs) and work orders (WOs), which improves asset uptime, performance, longevity, labor efficiency, and capital expense reduction, among other benefits. These benefits are multiplied when safety protocols are integrated with PMs and WOs as well as assets and equipment records, because CMMS users can then monitor safety drills, incidents, emergency notes, inspection data, job safety analysis (JSA) reports, and MSDSs (Material Safety Data Sheets). This integrated approach makes it easy to create and manage safety programs within the maintenance system – so safety is always a top priority.
Secondly, OSHA regulators and other auditors want a trackable history of what’s been done on a piece of equipment: when it was done, who did it, and how often it has been inspected. A CMMS safety report can be sorted by asset, repair technician, safety standard, or other criteria. That means, when an auditor questions an incident or exposes a safety risk, the maintenance record can prove that PMs have been performed on schedule, and that the incident was a one-time occurrence, with prevention measures in place for the future. Being able to provide this type of solid documentation with a few keystrokes saves time and money – and may even prevent fines and penalties.
Finally, CMMS users fundamentally take a proactive stance to preventing problems, rather than waiting to react after equipment breaks down, or an accident befalls a technician. When used fully, a CMMS can serve as an internal safety and health inspector that alerts everyone about what to do to ensure worker health – and a healthy bottom line.
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Be sure to hear Paul’s talk, which is part of track F64 Safety in the Job Shop presentation, 2:50-3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, November 12, 2014. And for a personalized demonstration of the new product editions, Bigfoot CMMS Enterprise and Enterprise+, visit Smartware Group at Booth #C1134.
FABTECH 2024
About the Expo
North America's largest metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing event heads to Orange County Convention Center in October 2024. FABTECH provides a convenient "one stop shop" venue where you can meet with world-class suppliers, see the latest industry products and developments, and find the tools to improve productivity, increase profits and discover new solutions to all of your metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing needs.
