Maintenance and Safety: The Toyota Way

Yesterday’s Advisor began a discussion on the role of maintenance workers in workplace safety.

These workers are positioned at a kind of crossroads of safety, our article maintained. As they literally get inside the machinery of production, they’re perfectly situated to issue early warnings of safety issues starting to develop, and to take early action to reverse the problems. But poorly managed or trained, maintenance workers can do more harm than good … by improperly caring for the machinery or even disabling safety features such as machine guards in reassembly.

To see one organization that’s gotten the role of maintenance in safety right, visit Georgetown, Kentucky, home of the giant Toyota plant that builds 400,000+ Camry and related models sold in the U.S. each year. According to reporting in BLR’s twice-monthly print newsletter, OSHA Compliance Advisor, maintenance plays a major role in the plant’s safety program.

---

Nearly 20 years! That’s how long safety professionals like you have depended on BLR’s twice-monthly OSHA Compliance Advisor newsletter for compliance and good practices news and ideas. Find out why with 2 issues completely on us. Click for details.

---

“Our key approach has been to increase proactive maintenance and decrease reactive maintenance for both productivity and safety reasons,” says Ed Welch, the plant’s manager for maintenance and engineering. “Unlike an unplanned (reactive) failure, a planned outage offers an opportunity to restore machinery and the safety procedures that need to be considered.”

To get the most in safety enhancement from the maintenance process, the Georgetown plant:

Provides maintenance with special tools for monitoring safe operation, including ultrasound and vibration analysis equipment. These enable workers to detect developing mechanical faults otherwise not apparent.

Builds safety discussions into maintenance meetings by having the plant’s safety and staffing director, attend. The agenda, OSHA Compliance Advisor reports, includes a review of injuries that have occurred within the industry and for which OSHA issued citations.

Has created policies to help maintenance people work safely and without interruption, by prohibiting other workers from going near machinery down for service, and by having a member of the safety department present for any major repairs.

Provides extra training in up to 50 key hazard areas, including confined space entry, mobile vehicle safety, and especially lockout/tagout—and does so no matter how experienced maintenance personnel are. Training records are kept by the safety and staffing department.

---

Try BLR’s OSHA Compliance Advisor twice-monthly newsletter at no cost for a full month, and only then decide. It’s news you can use, and no way to lose! Click here for info.

---

Has maintenance personnel wear high-visibility gear, so that when they appear unexpectedly in a work area to conduct an unplanned repair, they’re more easily seen.

Seeks to reduce the pressure maintenance workers feel when key equipment is down, and productivity is being delayed. Working proactively goes a long way toward that goal. “Proactive maintenance is less stressful,” says Ed Welch.

For More Reporting Like This…

If you find this pattern of reporting—raising a major safety issue, such as the role of maintenance in safety, and following it by a case study of how to make it work, appealing, you may want to take a more extensive look at the newsletter that did this reporting, OSHA Compliance Advisor. Safety professionals have depended on it for nearly two decades. Among the features it presents twice every month:

Latest OSHA and NIOSH news, court rulings, and proposed rules.

Compliance Report. Case studies of how promising ideas have been put to work.

Trainer’s Corner, providing practical, actionable tips to clue your workers in on safety

Washington Watch, offering an advance look at what’s coming down the compliance pike so you can be ready when it comes.

From the States summary, presenting little publicized state regs that often trump the Federal.

SafetyWorks monthly reproducible handouts for employees, ready to copy and distribute.

EHS & Your Business insert. A brand new quarterly insert that provides a ready-to-use “selling package” to bring senior management on board with your safety plans, using language they can relate to.

You can see many of these features by clicking on the Download Product Sample link below, and also view a full year’s worth of subject coverage by clicking on Download Subject Index.

Even better, you can experience all these benefits of OSHA Compliance Advisor at no cost or risk for a full month before deciding if you’d like to subscribe. Click here and we’ll be happy to arrange it.

Download Subject Index
Download Product Sample