Safety: A Key Ingredient In Productivity
Equipment and employee safety is key in maintaining a successful business. In a previous blog I discussed the need for proper equipment cleaning, but I did not address on the job safety. Below are examples of recent on the job injuries (shared by our customers) that could have been avoided if their employees were focused on safety and not unnecessary distractions.
Why should you NOT allow employees to run equipment and answer a cell phone?
An employee was recently burned by freshly extruded product. He was opening the nose cap when his phone rang, as he answered it he walked in front a machine that was extruding 160 C Full Fat Soy and got burnt. Casual conversation should be reserved for breaks or in a “safe zone” on the production floor.
Educate employees on where safe zones are and how to properly dispose of waste. An extrusion factory cleaner was having a conversation with another cleaner as they worked. They swept the floor where a welder had finished working and poured the machine waste into a conveyor that took the material to a hammermill. The cleaner was unaware that the waste included metal particles and because there was no magnets installed in the system, they got into the extruder and blocked it. In the process of trying to clean up the extruder, the nose cap fell on the foot of one of the workers who was not wearing a safety boot.
In both of these cases, employees suffered injuries that could have been avoided if they had been trained on safety, focused on their job duties and aware of their surroundings. Employee safety and proper training should be the responsibility of every employee, contractor and vendor you work with. For example, our service team trains our customers during the start-up process and safety is a key element of the training. However, safety training should not stop here. It is a continual effort to retrain and to continue to look for improving safety processes. As part of the Service Plus Program, we can retrain on safety issues and look for improvements with your production team. Click Here to read stories from customers who have built and maintained successful Insta-Pro Intl operations.
