Because of the rigorous nature of the work and the heavy machinery involved, factories and manufacturing plants can often be dangerous working environments. Therefore, risk assessments - commonly known as the foundation of making a machine safer - are necessary to curb potential hazards. A risk assessment is a logical, step by step breakdown of a machines’ processes, separating all the individual hazards so as to be able to focus on one at a time. As the industry continues to grow and more machines enter the work environment, risk assessments are critical to quell potential hazards and keep workers safe.

With the complexities and dangers associated with heavy machinery in a factory or manufacturing plant, it is important to be well-versed in the language of machine safety. Below, we’ll expound on a few key terms that are integral to maintaining safe working conditions.

Planning a safety system upgrade can be tricky and can be detrimental to your plant’s productivity. Therefore, it is vital that a clear and concise procedure be followed, right from initial conversion to final validation.

 The plethora of communication protocols and exhaustive list of security configurations make IIoT implementations a cumbersome task. However, a major challenge that organizations face is finding the starting point for their IIoT implementations.

 Poor safety practices within the plant floor can lead to a variety of problems and hazards within the work space. By clearing up misunderstandings regarding machine safety, many accidents can be avoided. This article is a continuation of "Top 10 Machine Safety Myths Debunked: Part 1."

 Poor safety practices within the plant floor can lead to regulatory fines, workers’ compensations, lost productivity and of course, a hazardous work space. Some, if not all, accidents can be avoided by clearing up misunderstandings regarding machine safeguarding, ensuring all practices are compliant to regulatory protocols.

The Digital Enterprise architecture is disrupting conventional workflows, changing the ways in which manufacturers operate. Real-time insights, improved collaboration, and digitization of manual processes through technology are some of the emerging concepts entering the decades old workplace culture. 

Laser scanners serve as a safeguarding mechanism in places where normal devices such as emergency plungers and pushbuttons aren’t viable. The technology used within laser scanners is called “time-of-flight”, which involves the scanner calculating the position of the object based on the time taken by the laser to travel back.

For operators working in an automated environment, safety is dependent on two core factors. Firstly, the safety layers that a process has been embedded with, and secondly, the operator’s own knowledge regarding the workings of the process and how to manage it during abnormal states. Control systems have evolved greatly, incorporating multiple layers of automated safety within them that act as barriers to accident prevention at different scales. Nonetheless, the risk always remains and therefore efforts should be made to minimize its occurrence.

Productivity, efficiency and profits have all soared within the manufacturing industry thanks to the advent of machines and robotics. The benefits do make a strong case for the technologies’ advancements and complicated implementations; however, these systems aren’t free of hazards, especially for the workforce that operates on them.