Safety in All Things Maintenance
Lizile Xulu
Asset Performance Management | Certified Six Sigma Coach | Certified Reliability ABC Practitioner
Safety cannot be spoken about in isolation, it needs to be integrated in all actions and discussions in the workplace and maintenance is no exclusion.
Maintenance is a high-risk activity with specific hazards and risks and these include working alongside a running process and in close contact with machinery. During normal operation, automation typically diminishes the likelihood of human error that can lead to accidents.
Regular maintenance is essential to keep equipment, machines and the work environment safe and reliable. Lack of maintenance or inadequate maintenance can lead to dangerous situations, accidents, environmental and health problems.
A safe maintenance tasks is not magic, nor is it dependent on exotic technologies or expensive instruments or systems. Instead, it is dependent on doing simple, basic tasks that will result in a safe working environment. These basics include the following:
- The work environment and general condition of equipment
- Technical knowledge to perform the task
- Tools and Personal protective equipment to perform the task
- Effective use of sensor technology
The Occupational Health and Safety Act, 1993, requires the employer to bring about and maintain, as far as reasonably practicable, a work environment that is safe and without risk to the health of the workers.
Some practitioners take the view that it is far too costly and time consuming to collect reliability data, they stop on completing the FMECA, even when the data is available to calculate the reliability parameters. Instead they use guess work, euphemistically called "engineering judgement" to determine the task frequency. If the task frequency is not aligned to the wear out pattern, then the equipment is at risk of suffering catastrophic failure, thus presenting a potential hazard for not only the operator but the maintenance technician as well.
It is vital that maintenance personnel have the required knowledge, skills and abilities to safely perform maintenance tasks.Technical know-how plays an important part in maintaining safe work practices. Maintenance personnel should be trained on the up keep and maintenance requirements of all equipment they are responsible for, training should cover the specific safety and health hazards, emergency operations and safe working practices.
Keeping all safety branding, signage and messages clear, relevant and visible. Having a cluster of safety signs posted up throughout the operation does not necessarily increase the understating of safety risks, nor does it necessarily prevent injuries. It is important that safety equipment and protective clothing are properly identified, relevant and directly related to the actual task being performed and not just a tick box on a work order task.
An average, fit, healthy and well rested person can concentrate on a task for about 55 minutes in each hour. Humans are not consistently alert or sensitive to small changes and cannot get inside small spaces, especially when machines are operational, it is therefore necessary to use sensors that will measure the condition and transmit information to external indicators where readings can be observed from a safe position.
The key is to limit the exposure or mitigating work associated risks. Simply getting the basics right provides the foundation for developing a good safety culture in the work place.
Never underestimate the importance of setting and maintaining high standards of housekeeping. The environment plays an important role on how we manage and implement safety in the work place and has a positive ripple effect on other aspects of the organisation, like production and maintenance. If we fail on safety, people ultimately die.
References
- D.M. Frangopol, Y. Tsompanakis, 2015, Maintenance and Safety of Ageing Infrastructure, Volume 10, CRC Press.
- V. Narayan, 2004, Effective Maintenance Management: Risk and Reliability Strategies for Optimizing Performance, Industrial Press New York.
- R. Mobley, 2004, Maintenance Fundamentals, Elsevier Inc.
- ISO 23932-1:2018, Fire Safety Engineering — General Principles — Part 1: General
- ISO 41001:2018, Facility management — Management systems — Requirements with guidance for use.
- ISO 45001, Occupational health and safety management systems — Requirements with guidance for use.
- ISO 14001, Environmental management systems — Requirements with guidance for use.
So its very much important for us as Maintenance personnel to practice the so called pre-task risk assessment procedure whereby we must identify the hazards and Risk then controll them with imeddiately