Monthly Archives: October 2013

Exit Routes

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Twitt

Exit routes, also known as evacuation plans or means of egress, are the paths your employees can take to exit your facility in the event of an emergency. These exit routes must be properly designed, implemented, distributed, and maintained. If they aren’t, your company is in violation of OSHA Standards and your employees are at risk.

There are 2 primary standards which relate to exit routes – Standard 1910.36 and Standard 1910.37. Standard 1910.36 mainly focuses on creating an evacuation plan, including how many exits and how many different routes to the exits must be available. Standard 1910.37 focuses on exit route maintenance.

Standard 1910.36 needs to be a consideration from the beginning as you create your evacuation plan. It sets the guidelines not only for the flow of the routes and the number of required routes and exits, but also for the construction of the routes and exits. This includes the materials used, the size of the openings, the types of doors at the openings, and how these routes and exits must be accessed.

Standard 1910.37, meanwhile, must be a long term consideration as you maintain your facility. This standard tells you what safety features, signage, and lighting are required for the many different types of exit routes available. If you have not recently reviewed your exit routes to ensure they are up to code with this standard, it might be a good time to schedule a third party safety audit – in the event of an emergency, it is important to be sure your employees can evacuate your facility safely and effectively.

Should you have any questions about establishing or maintaining your exit routes, please contact us. And if you have anything else to add about exit routes, please leave a  comment.

Preventive Maintenance Placards

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Twitt

Preventive maintenance can help reduce replacement costs over the life of your machinery. It can also keep the machinery up to code and help to ensure your employees are safe while using machinery at your facility. Properly maintaining your machinery can be as simple as properly oiling chains, cleaning residue, or checking fluid levels. But ensuring your staff are properly following, or even know about, the required maintenance is not always easy.

This is why our clients utilize preventive maintenance placards. These placards can be affixed directly to your machinery, or placed nearby, and allow employees to be certain they are performing required daily tasks to keep your machinery running properly. Based upon the maintenance requirements, you can create a system on the placard which would require employees to initial completion of each task as they perform it, daily. This would allow you to inspect the completion of each task, and would hold employees accountable for each task.

By ensuring these tasks are completed daily, your machines will run better, longer, and their safety features will continue to work properly. By ensuring your machines are properly maintained, you will see a significant cost savings in the way of replacing machinery, and you will not have the same risk of injury as machines age.

If you have any questions about your preventive maintenance plan, or if you would like more information on our placards, please contact us. If you would like to add anything about the importance of preventive maintenance or the importance of establishing an appropriate plan for ensuring the preventive maintenance is performed, please leave a comment.

Maintaining Your Lockout Tagout Procedures

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Twitt

Establishing lockout tagout procedures is not an easy task. But most businesses account for this difficulty, and plan accordingly. Where most companies run into lockout tagout problems is around the maintenance and monitoring of those procedures. This is because lockout tagout procedures are fluid and ever changing; every time a machine is added, removed, or changed out, the lockout tagout procedures should be adjusted. Every time an employee starts or ends a shift, the procedures should be updated.

And this creates an incredible burden on any safety team. So, many companies inadvertently cut corners and do not properly monitor their lockout tagout procedures. On the other side of the equation, you find many companies that overpay for lockout tagout monitoring services. This leaves a situation where you must choose between a strong bottom line or a safe work environment.

But now, there is an option which is both cost-effective and which leaves no room for error, meaning your employees are always safe and you are always in compliance. This option is computerized monitoring of your lockout tagout procedures, and PF Safety has an excellent option in this space.

Factory Solutions Software is a fully scalable, fully customizable, web-based program which allows you, your safety team, and your employees to go in at any time and make changes to your lockout tagout procedures. It also constantly checks to ensure you are in compliance with OSHA Standard 1910.147.

If you have any questions about lockout tagout procedures or their monitoring, or if you have any questions about Factory Solutions Software, please contact us. And if you have anything to add about lockout tagout maintenance, please leave a comment.