Page 20 - Occupational Health & Safety, October 2018

FACILITY SAFETY
Just What the Doctor Ordered
Planned maintenance can boost safety, increase efficiency, and lower long-term costs.
BY GERRY TIMMS
Annual physical examinations are not some- thing that anyone looks forward to. First you need to shoehorn the visit into your schedule, then there’s the agonizing long waiting room experience, all of which leads up to an hour’s worth of poking, prodding, and a lecture on diet and exercise. Not fun at all.
Nonetheless, most adults would prefer the incon- venience of an annual physical—allowing them to ad- dress potential problems before they fully take hold— than risk discovering a disease after it has become financially disastrous or too far advanced to treat.
Unfortunately, many facility managers essentially run their plant using the latter approach. In fact, ap- proximately 55 percent of them use a reactive ap- proach. But living by the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mantra can lead to major problems down the line. Although operations might run smoothly for days, weeks, or even months, ignoring routine maintenance can lead to breakdowns comparable to a total loss (and facility managers will quickly learn there isn’t health insurance to soften the blow).
Dock Equipment Eventually Breaks Down
Forklifts and tractor trailers wear down loading dock equipment every day. Dock levelers, vehicle restraints, and dock doors take punishment every time a new shipment must be loaded or unloaded. Eventually, even good equipment will succumb to heavy use, as evidenced by the fact that 70 to 85 percent of all equipment failures are due to improper maintenance.
A forklift, which weighs about 9,000 pounds with-
out carrying a load, might make as many as 50 cross- ings to load or unload one trailer. Extrapolate this across an entire day and multiply by 250 workdays in the year (or more), and it can be more than 100,000 crossings in one year.
Barriers applied at the edge of loading docks that protect pedestrians from accidentally stepping off and prevent forklift and other vehicle operators from in- advertently rolling over the edge also can be damaged over time (or if improperly implemented). If a barrier has been struck several times, its effectiveness can be diminished. Eventually, this will lead to a disastrous break that can lead to injury or death of a worker.
The evidence piles up quickly to see why level- ers, restraints, and other equipment can (and will) break down.
Specialized doors, such as automated barrier doors, can protect employees from potentially dangerous operations while simultaneously taking regular punishment from daily operations.
In-Plant Equipment Doesn’t
Last Forever, Either
Inside the plant, essential equipment also undergoes its share of daily usage and heavy wear and tear. In- dustrial doors—from high-speed doors to automat- ed barrier doors—are used dozens, if not hundreds, of times a day. These doors are tasked with important responsibilities, such as saving energy, protecting workers from harm, and separating various process- es and spaces to maximize productivity and overall product quality.
Doors are particularly important when it comes to running an efficient operation because we rely on them for so many different uses. Their function is gen- erally taken for granted, but as anyone who has spent some time in a facility knows, any downtime where their doors aren’t functioning properly affects produc- tivity, energy consumption, and, ultimately, revenue.
Specialized doors, such as automated barrier doors, can protect employees from potentially dangerous op- erations while simultaneously taking regular punish- ment from daily operations. A machine operator might open an automated door for a welding or grinding cell more than 100 times in a day. Not to mention, the in- side portion of the door regularly gets struck with po- tentially damaging debris. Some doors will be able to
20 Occupational Health & Safety | OCTOBER 2018
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