People often wonder what motivates companies to make improvements in their machine safeguarding. As a supplier of this equipment, we often find that four things influence these decisions.
First, serious accidents are sometimes the reason. Unfortunately, machine safeguarding may be a back burner issue until something catastrophic occurs.
Second, inspections by insurance companies who write worker’s compensation policies often uncover issues involving unguarded machines. This prompts them to throw a company into the insurance “pool” for high risk accounts resulting in higher premiums.
Third, state or federal OSHA inspections may reveal similar problems with incomplete machine guarding, resulting in fines, along with the costs of abatements/corrections.
Fourth, some larger companies invoke their own machine safeguarding rules that go “above and beyond” OSHA regulations and ANSI safety standards.
In any case, Rockford Systems, LLC offers machine safety surveys where one of our machine safety specialists will visit your plant to conduct a detailed inspection of either specific machines in question, or of all your machines if you wish.