Safety - an essential element for industry

Safety has become be a key focus for every business - as important as meeting financial objectives. Strategies that make risk assessment an intuitive part of the job and which encourage personal responsibility are crucial in fostering a culture of continual improvement of safe working practices.

Safety impacts all aspects of a company’s activities, from manufacturing processes, through to the finished manufactured product, and on to equipment installation and maintenance. Historically viewed as an impediment to profitability, safety is now rightly considered to be a key performance indicator - every bit as important for a company as its bottom line. As with profitability, safety performance is a facet of a business where continuous improvement should be both sought and expected.

Internal operating systems are often key vehicles for continuous improvement across all elements within a business - including safety. For example, Champion Compressors operates a system called ACE (Achieving Competitive Excellence), which has facilitated improvements in safety performance across all processes. This includes operations both in house and off site, and has further enabled Champion to engineer advanced safety systems into the company’s own product offerings.

The design of Champion’s products is shaped by the engineers’ attention not only to safe operation, but also to safe maintenance. Here, the compressor’s inner workings are neatly contained in a hinged cabinet system. The fully enclosed nature of the compressors prevents access to mechanical hazards.

When the cabinet doors are removed for maintenance, the compressor’s key risk areas relate to the drives, which join the motor to the air compressor, and the rotating shafts powering the air-cooling fan. Other dangers pertain to the hoses, valves and joints that channel high-pressure fluids. Champion’s compressors feature fixed guards where the possibility of entanglement in moving parts may exist, plus pressure switches and safety valves in certain risk areas to avoid over-pressure situations.

The importance of nurturing the same safety culture for all employees and contractors - whether they are working in an office, a manufacturing facility or conducting service work at a customer site - cannot be overstated. It is crucial that the safety process remains constant. Every job needs to be preceded by a risk assessment and encompass a safe work methods statement. Operatives cannot work safely unless they are able to assess the work environments for potential hazards, and take appropriate action to mitigate the risks to both themselves and others. Champion operates a pre-work assessment program called SLAM - stop, look, assess, manage - which assists in the identification of potential hazards.

Incorporating safety into standard work procedures and complementing it with training is the best way to create and sustain a culture where employees instinctively think of their own safety as part of their routine work. Taking this concept a stage further, many jobs can be enhanced using electronic service devices to take the place of paper-based systems. The beauty of a system like this is that it can provide guidelines on how a task should be undertaken, and what possible hazards need to be considered. It then can automatically generate safety records for every job undertaken.

By implementing systems like these, and through constant vigilance, Champion has managed to go more than six years without incurring a single lost-time injury. While we are proud of this achievement, there is no room for complacency. Just as Champion continues to strive forward to engineer enhanced guarding and protection into the design of our compressed air solutions - even though they already exceed all current Australian safety standards - so we will persist in optimising our safe working practices. Safety, after all, is a journey, not a destination.

Mark Ferguson has been part of the Champion Compressors team since 1987, when he joined as a graduate mechanical engineer. Subsequent roles in sales (state and national), marketing and project management have seen Ferguson acquire an in-depth understanding of compressed air technology and its application in industry. In his current role as Executive Sales Manager, Ferguson is responsible for the company’s sales, service and marketing strategies for both the Australian and international markets.

Image credit: Nolan Bradbury Jigsaw Creative (www.jigsawcreative.com.au).