Preventive Maintenance Can Reduce Safety Risk

Preventive maintenance and safety are disciplines not typically seen as closely related, but bridging the two silos can help identify low probability risks with severe injury potential.

A risk assessment of your facility and processes, talking with maintenance workers and supervisors about tasks infrequently / rarely performed, and other means to gain input on jobs not typically reviewed are steps in the right direction.

Once you have identified the tasks and risks, I strongly encourage you to ask preventive maintenance-related questions. Things like:

• If we did better preventive maintenance, would the operation have less frequent unscheduled maintenance? (When unscheduled breakdowns happen in a production bottleneck, it is a short step for employees to ignore lockout or other safety procedures in an effort to get production up and running)
• If we don’t do proper preventive maintenance on a process operation (continuous flow, heat treat, etc), could the result be potentially catastrophic?
• Who is responsible for preventive maintenance, are they properly trained, how often is it done, do maintenance personnel understand the safety risks, etc?
• Do we have standardized preventive maintenance processes and procedures? Is safety part of the work routine?

When we take the broader view of safety integrated with preventive maintenance, we may well see opportunities to improve both uptime and safety. That’s a unique opportunity for HSE to be part of improving productivity while reducing risk in a tangible way. Moreover, much of the work may fall to Engineering or others who have the primary responsibility for preventive maintenance.

Traditional occupational safety is necessary but no longer sufficient in this day and age when we are properly challenged to demonstrate value to the organization. Bust into the silo of preventive or planned maintenance and look for new opportunities to reduce risk.