The maintenance of your company’s machinery may not seem very important to your Safety and Health Management System at first glance, but it is actually a key component to ensuring safety. Machinery that falls into disrepair can be dangerous in a number of ways and can violate any one of a number of OSHA procedures. Further, improperly maintained machinery will need costly repairs more often than properly maintained machines, and will need to be replaced more frequently, and both of these outcomes will directly impact your bottom line.
That is why preventative maintenance is so important to your business. Proper machine maintenance needs to be included in your safety plan, and needs to be properly monitored and regulated. Otherwise, no matter how well you plan out other things, such as your lockout tagout procedures, you will not be able to properly account for machine malfunctions, glitches, and other issues. The best safety plans in the world can not account for malfunctioning machinery that is not properly maintained.
Fortunately, preventative maintenance is not difficult to monitor and track. The first step to ensuring your machinery is consistently running properly is to determine what maintenance is required and with what frequency – every shift, daily, weekly, etc. Once you have determined the activities required and their frequency, you need to come up with a system to allow your team to track the maintenance activities they are performing on each machine.
We have found that preventative maintenance placards are the easiest way to accomplish this. With properly designed placards, you can note which activities need to be performed when, and track who is performing these tasks. Additionally, by utilizing systems such as we have outlined, you can ensure you adhere to Sigma Six, lean manufacturing standards, and just in time. If you do not currently have a preventative maintenance schedule or if you need placards, please contact us so that we can help you through this process. And if you have any advice for companies looking to set up a preventative maintenance plan, please leave a comment.
