Safety: How to Spend $2,000 to Save $20,000

By Paul Davis, Machine Safety Expert, Paul Davis Automation

Imagine arriving at work and finding the OSHA area district compliance officer waiting to tell you that your facility has been selected for an audit. If you've never experienced an OSHA walk-through at your facility before, you think the process will be relatively painless. After all, your OSHA 300 log looks good and there have been no formal complaints made to OSHA by any of your employees.

By the end of the day, your picture of how this should have gone, and how it actually went are very different. It turns out that the compliance officer has found some inadequacies in your company's lock out program and some compliance issues in your machine guarding. There are citations with fines, demands for corrections by a certain date, and follow-up inspections are being scheduled. Plus there are heavy financial penalties that are a direct hit to your formerly healthy bottom line.

Let's consider OSHA's financial penalties. The average OSHA Citation is around $7,500 per incident. If there are duplicate machines in your facility, the citation could easily be $7,500 times the number of machines. At a typical mid-sized facility, the costs can easily run upwards of $20,000. Size of the company being audited, history, and good faith can all be factors considered by OSHA to possibly reduce the actual citation, but you can't count on that.

Performing a safety audit in advance of an OSHA visit can prevent this kind of setback and highlight potential inefficiencies in your production operations structure as well.

To give you an idea of the types of issues a safety audit can bring to light, consider the following example: A safety audit of one manufacturer highlighted a concern with the safety light curtains used for operator protection on two identical machines. Not only were the light curtains produced by two different companies, they were also different types—one was a Type Four and the other was a Type Two. Type Four safety light curtains are meant for applications where the potential severity of the injury is so high that constant automatic checking of the safety device is required. Type Two safety light curtains are meant for less hazardous detection applications and only perform a self-check on start up.

Both machines were used for pipe cutting and the safety light curtains were meant to stop the machine should an operator's hand enter the danger zone. If an injury were to occur with these machines, the damaged limb would likely be irreparable, meaning potential loss of a hand or finger. Based on the risk assessment performed by the safety consultant, a Type Four safety light curtain at the proper safe distance from the hazard would be required for this application.

Siemens Energy & Automation and its partners are offering a unique service to qualified customers to help them find these problems in their facilities. The program, called "Two for Twenty," involves bringing a Siemens-provided safety consultant to your facility for a day, typically at a cost of around $2,000.

The audit performed by the consultant will identify any potential safety problems that could result in OSHA citations which, as stated before, can easily add up to $20,000—thus the name "Two for Twenty." After a day in the selected facility, a written report with photographs of the potential hazards will be provided to the customer. It is then the customer's responsibility to review the safety audit and implement the suggested corrective actions. Should more time be required to perform the audit, prices can be negotiated based on the size of the project.

For more information on Simplified Safety, click here.