Last week, I shared an example of how a casual conversation with a maintenance worker revealed a serious fire hazard. The point of the story is this: If you want to get the bigger picture of your shop-wide safety situation, you need to open the lines of communication with your maintenance staff. Let's look at the benefits of this relationship and how you can assess whether or not your communication flow needs improvement.

What Maintenance Trends Reveal
A safety team should be in a close working relationship with plant maintenance and work to communicate maintenance trends. Here is what we have to gain:

• Trends can be indicators of future equipment failures that may cause injuries;
• Trends can be indicators of a need to reevaluate existing JSAs to take any recurring faults into account;
• Trends can be an indicator that equipment needs replacement as a safety precaution;
• Trends can indicate that equipment is incorrect for the applied task; and
• Trends can indicate that employees are not following JSAs and abusing equipment.

What To Look For
To assess whether you need to improve the flow of communication between the safety department and the maintenance team, ask yourself:

1. Are the folks who fix your equipment just replacing parts or do they consider upgrading safety features during a repair to enhance safety? Restoring a machine or facility to its original condition may not be sufficient. There is a reason why codes, procedures and rules are constantly being updated. For instance, fixing some bad wiring on a fire alarm system to restore it to functionality might not bring it up to current local fire codes.
2. Do repair crews rush to "patch" a defect to get production running again, or do they take time to insist on correct parts? Maintenance crews are often pressured by first line supervisors to "just get it fixed" in order to get production flowing again. Sometimes these repairs can be as hazardous as the original fault. As a safety person, do you have sufficient oversight to follow up and ensure that the "quick-fixes" are followed up with properly executed repairs?
3. Are your maintenance people somehow letting you know when a pattern of repetitive failures occur that may indicate faulty work habits, or equipment that is not up to the process that is required of it? This is particularly of interest with company-provided power tools such as grinders, which have high speed rotating parts. This type of reporting is a tip-off that the process or worker training needs to be evaluated and the root cause of the recurring problem corrected.
4. When installing or moving equipment, do your maintenance people inform you of the plan prior to working? This information would allow evaluation for new hazards that may develop from the changes. A machine that performs beautifully in one area may be a nightmare of noise, air quality or pinch points in another location.
5. Catch 22... When maintenance is instructed by a rushed management decision to put in or implement a new facility safety item, are you consulted to ensure that it does not interfere with or affect another feature? In a facility I used to work in, the company built a beautiful rack for storing oxygen bottles to replace an old, damaged one. The problem? Once installed, it partially blocked the opening of an exit door. Without cross talk and planning the fix to one fire hazard simply spawned another one.
6. Are your maintenance workers using OEM parts or manufacturer-approved parts on critical equipment such as PITs (forklifts) and cranes? Often generic replacement parts such as hydraulic hoses, seats, lights, etc., can void warranties and more importantly can be classified as a modification to the equipment. If the unauthorized part fails and injury occurs, your company is liable for the results. If you don't know if OEM parts are being used, or maintenance is training their workers to not modify OEM equipment, you need to find out. Stress to management that using generic parts on critical equipment is opening the door for a legal nightmare for the sake of small, up-front savings. It's not worth the risk.

Conclusion
If you have a safety committee, I strongly suggest that you ensure a member of the maintenance staff is on it. As a safety manager, you should be talking to the people that repair, install, tune up and paint. They're a gold mine of information. They're usually the first to see flaws, cracks, breaks, sags and smoke. Teach them to think beyond the components and consider how doing quality work and sharing information with safety (by written report or orally) makes the work environment better for everyone. Ask them to let you know about unusual repair activities and trends, so you can fold the data into the bigger picture of shop-wide safety.

Story Tools:  Email This Post  Print This Post Top