Begin creating a productive and safe workplace by conducting a virtual risk assessment to ensure machine safety
A safe work environment is one of the keys to maintaining a productive workplace. On top of keeping employees safe, it has the added benefit of increasing throughput and making your operations more efficient. The first step toward ensuring the safety of your employees is to conduct a virtual risk assessment.
Properly assessing potential risks in a manufacturing facility provides a better look at ways to improve machine safety. A risk assessment identifies and documents the tasks and hazards that lead to risk on a machine or process and offers risk reduction strategies in order to ensure machine safety.
What is a Risk Assessment?
When designing or using a machine, any potential risks must be assessed and evaluated. Where necessary, additional protective measures must be implemented to protect operators and other individuals from hazards. A risk assessment is a sequence of logical steps based on the systematic analysis and evaluation of risks.
The machine is then designed and used according to the results of the risk assessment. If necessary, risk reduction follows a risk assessment by applying suitable protective measures. This methodology will identify the potential hazards associated with a machine or group of machines and quantify the associated risk by:
- Identifying hazards during setup, operation, maintenance and cleaning
- Establishing minimum performance requirements safety-related parts of the control system
- Evaluating existing risk reduction measures and providing recommendation for improvement
Although the prerequisites for building safe machines and systems are diverse, all risks must be identified. Then, appropriate measures for minimizing risk need to be identified and their potential effectiveness at reducing risk defined. Experts from SICK offer knowledge and experience to assist with a risk assessment – right from the start. This saves time and resources.
Virtual Risk Assessments
And now, these risk assessments can be done in-person or virtually, depending on the need. SICK’s new virtual risk assessments are completed without traveling to your facility. A virtual risk assessment is conducted in much the same way as an in-person visit. A detailed risk assessment report is completed by a safety application specialist from SICK and completed according to ANSI B11.0, ISO 12100 and other applicable standards. The report is a Task Based Risk Assessment (TaBRA) that evaluates each individual task and how to make improvements on your machine. From this, you’ll get recommended risk reduction measures to be applied to your equipment.
How exactly will these be conducted virtually? Photos, videos, and layouts of your machinery will be reviewed prior to a one-on-one video call. The experts from SICK will have you walk around the machines so they can see the exact details of various aspects of the machine. Once completed, and the report will be generated by our safety application specialist and delivered to you upon completion.
All risk assessments from SICK look at the same things: potential hazards, potential severity of hazards, probability of occurrence of harm, and ways to reduce risk. The benefit of working with SICK is that we offer decades of machine safeguarding knowledge and expertise, paired with active involvement in a wide range of safety standardization committees, ensuring that the most up-to-date regulations, requirements and best practices are taken into account.
Interested in having a virtual risk assessment conducted on your machines? Contact your SICK representative today at info@sick.com.
