Productivity, quality, risk and safety - the pillars of efficient manufacturing

In today’s complex industrial landscape, maximising productivity is paramount for companies to remain competitive. Implementing an effective safety solution is an important step towards improving productivity in the industrial environment. Australian companies face many challenges in their effort to improve competitiveness, including rising energy prices and increasing environmental regulations.

The philosophy of machine safety has evolved from what used to be an ‘add-on’ approach, where safety features were retrofitted to machinery, to where safety is now increasingly considered part of the overall machine design. Experience has shown the best way to implement safety is to incorporate it from the outset of machine design, enabling it to become part of the whole integrated system.

Safety standards are continually evolving, allowing the introduction of new technology. Newer standards have become more performance based - the required outcome is dictated - but the method is more open-ended. While incorporating an effective safety solution is a legislated requirement for companies, there are many other important reasons for maintaining a safe working environment including moral and ethical obligations, brand image, public perception, WorkCover premiums, workplace morale, quality and productivity.

While Australia continues to follow the AS4024 standard for machine safety, new standards have been introduced and adopted internationally, such as the new ISO EN 13849 standard in Europe. It’s important for local companies to understand changes in global standards. When importing equipment from overseas machine suppliers, they will want to ensure the equipment supplied meets Australian requirements. Conversely, if exporting equipment into the European Community, their customers will most likely request compliance with this ISO EN standard.

In applying AS4024, a risk assessment provides information about the level of risk by considering the severity of possible injuries, frequency and duration of exposure to potential hazards, and the probability of avoidance. The risk level of a particular hazard/task combination will then determine, among other things, the safety control system requirements. The new ISO standards acknowledge that machine safety is also impacted by other factors including diagnostic coverage, common-cause failure measures and mean time to dangerous failure - which is related to the quality of components used in the safety parts of the control system. To address this, many manufacturers now provide functional safety data for components commonly used as part of a safety system. This data can be used to help determine Performance Level under ISO EN 13849.

Advances in networking technology provide a new dimension to the integration of industrial safety solutions. Networks are the foundation of integrated safety, providing a backbone for safety control and large amounts of diagnostic and status information to be relayed back to the control system. In the past, networks were only used in complex applications with larger machines and control systems, but as technology has developed we can see it being applied economically to less complex safety systems.

As safety and standard components continue to become more seamlessly integrated into control system designs, implementing safety will no longer be a separate discipline, but rather a concurrent and more natural part of the design process - keeping workers and machines safer while increasing productivity and quality and reducing risk.

Gary Milburn, Product Manager Safety & Sensing Components, Rockwell Automation, has worked in the area of machine safety for over 25 years and is actively involved in promoting Rockwell Automation’s range of safety capabilities. He has been involved in the very early days of machine safety standards being contemplated and developed for Australia.