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The State of Safety
Workplace safety is a multifaceted issue for many manufacturers and industrial operators. It includes both machine and process safety, and is vital to protecting workers, avoiding production interruptions and achieving operational excellence. But it also comes with a number of challenges, including:Worker behaviours:
Operators try and sometimes succeed in bypassing poorly designed safety systems, so a safety-system design must consider every human-task interaction – however even in a well-designed safety system workers may not follow standard operating procedures, which can result in unnecessary downtime.
53 percent of manufacturing and industrial operations lack real-time visibility into EHS performance data. LNS Research
An evolving workforce:
There is an on-going shift in the workforce profile which has significant safety implications. With older workers still on the job a higher risk of certain injuries exists, with longer recovery periods. While the younger, less experienced workers taking their place are more prone to injury and tend to have more serious injuries.
Regulatory compliance:
Compliance with complex global safety standards is increasingly essential but also challenging. At the same time, these standards allow for the use of more advanced safety technologies that enable companies to address safety and productivity in new ways.
Data management:
Many safety professionals continue to rely on out-dated data collection and reporting methods. Most often, safety data is manually entered for inspections, compliance logs, incident reports, training and other processes. And the systems in which this data is stored are not connected to plant-floor systems. This is in sharp contrast to the growing use of real-time data and seamless connectivity in the other areas of the production environment.
Often the data needed is trapped inside safety or control systems and implementing Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) technologies to release that data is a great first step, but ensuring that any future safety system designs employ 'Smart' safety sensors and relays or controllers with networking capability is the next step.
Safety Designed In
Opting to implement a safety system designed with a single manufacturer can simplify the process. It can help ensure standards compliance and avoid unforeseen complications. By choosing Rockwell Allen-Bradley safety components you can benefit from:Safety Automation Builder with Risk Assessment Built In:
Safety Automation Builder streamlines safety system design, helping improve compliance and reduce costs by guiding you through the development of your safety system including safety system layout, product selection, and safety analysis to help you meet machinery safety Performance Level (PL) requirements outlined by EN ISO 13849-1. Combining SAB with RASWin Risk Assessment software helps you manage your progression through the functional safety lifecycle, organizing information from each step of the process and machinery validation.
Pre-engineered safety functions for machines:
Rockwell have a developed a series of safety function documents each providing guidance for a specific safety function based on functional requirement, equipment selection, and performance level requirement, including set-up and wiring, configuration, verification and validation plan, and calculation of performance level.
Machine-generated data will increase to 42 percent of all data by 2020. IBM
