Plant safety - Important tips for plant managers

The safety of a production plant is, at the end of the day, always the responsibility of the company itself. This responsibility cannot be externalized, but external experts can be extremely useful in improving plant safety.

The role of the expert is highlighted if a company’s own resources are not sufficient to ensure safety. This is actually quite common: many people act as OHS managers alongside their own positions, which means that they cannot possibly focus on safety issues as much as they should. In many companies, the focus is too much on occupational safety, even though it is only one small slice of a very big safety pie.

Plant safety – leave no stone unturned

Precisely the above-mentioned challenges are what inspired Etteplan to develop plant safety services, which cover basically very aspect of production plant safety. We provide customers with experts who analyze plant safety from a bird’s eye perspective and leave no stone unturned.

We can draw up an analysis of the current situation, with an extensive look at the production plant’s operations line by line from the required safety viewpoint. Based on the analysis, we can create risk analyses, identify hazards, suggest necessary measures and estimate a budget for their implementation.

We consult with the company’s management and help to identify the factors that need attention at their plant and ensure that the plant is absolutely safe and in compliance with regulations and standards. We assist the company’s management in getting the hang of the quality management systems and help to develop and audit a safety management system for the company.

If required, we can also help in monitoring regulations and directives: companies operating in the EU need to continuously stay on top of legislation that impacts their operations. Companies do not always have the required in-house resources for this, however.

Building new or revamping the old

Etteplan’s plant safety services are useful whenever investments are made in production plants. Whether it is about building a new plant or modernizing an old one, the various aspects of safety always need to be factored in, so that the end result complies with statutory requirements. There is also reason to be careful when making an investment in a new type of equipment or when an individual machine is converted for a new purpose.

In each of these cases, Etteplan’s expertise becomes invaluable. We help to assure a high level of process safety so that the operational safety of the processes is guaranteed and ongoing processes can be safely and reliably shut down if there is a disruption in production.

Machine safety is an indispensable aspect of any investment in machinery. The so-called self-certification linked to EU legislation is giving companies’ management grey hairs; it allows machine manufacturers to monitor the safety of their own products and grant their product with a CE marking. When machine combinations arrive at production plants, the angle of safety monitoring changes.

From the viewpoint of the production plant representative, the conformity of a machine combination consisting of robots and conveyors can be monitored based on the machine manufacturer’s documentation: Does the manufacturer’s declaration mention the standards that apply to the robots or risk assessments, or are there any indications that the standards have only partially been followed?

A third party such as Etteplan can familiarize itself with the product’s conformity and through this insight help make a successful investment decision.

In addition to occupational, process and machine safety, our expertise also covers practically all of the other safety sub-areas. With the help of our expertise, risks can be minimized and plant safety brought up to a high standard so that you can be free to focus on your core competence.