Many manufacturers are facing weakened demand due to a confluence of factors that spell bad news: falling orders, increased customer inventory (which will reduce future demand), higher material costs, and dicey interest rates. Manufacturers seeing market demand shrink continue to face hard choices to keep their doors open, and your company may already be looking into trimming inefficiencies. Even companies facing increased demand are looking for scalable processes and lean growth strategies to turn that increased revenue into profit. However, modifying manufacturing operations to prioritize speed and cost efficiency often deprioritizes manufacturing safety.
Before your organization implements streamlined measures, it’s important to take a step back and consider two things:
1.) Do the new processes actively take time, funding, and attention from safety measures? If so, what can you do to maximize safety while still reaching for new productivity metrics?
2.) Do the new automation and digitization protocols change your operations enough that they introduce new gaps in safety—and how can you close them back up?
This guide will help you answer those questions when it comes to fall protection and OSHA compliance. Start by considering some of the most likely emerging gaps in your safety measures. Then, we’ll explore how manufacturing safety protocols that may seem inefficient at first glance can actually provide greater savings and productivity in the new world of manufacturing.
Streamlining Operations Paves the Way to Competitive Growth—But Often Sacrifices Safety
Initiatives to streamline operations and incorporate new technologies always open the door to unexpected opportunities and unexpected detriments. Manufacturers saw this in the early days of lights-off manufacturing: machines could practically run themselves 24/7—but once a mistake caught on, it compounded on itself and could cause catastrophic waste if a human wasn’t there to step in.
Here are some of the emerging pathways to streamlined production—and the ways they can accidentally sacrifice safety if a qualified professional isn’t there to step in:
- Using machinery to close the skilled labor gap: Companies are turning to automated machining stations, computer-controlled production systems, and robots to make up for losses in skilled labor (and to save on labor costs along the way). But this could leave your human teams full of inexperienced or under-trained workers. The machines themselves also present new dangers.
- AI adoption: AI and generative AI can zero in on inefficiencies, find patterns in your production data, and recommend new courses of action. However, relying completely on AI-based insights is dangerous. The software hallucinates and makes up facts. It also can’t survey a workspace and see the same hazards that a human can instantly recognize as a problem and proactively solve.
- Harsh supply chain and speed-based metrics: What’s measured is managed—ambitious analytics are a great business practice. But when corporate strategists start squeezing the timeline to counter supply chain disruption and maximize efficiency, human workers often get penalized for taking the time to stay safe. This can manifest as walking too quickly in dangerous settings, leaving safety gates propped open, and deciding skip wearing active fall protection gear even when it’s necessary.
- Prioritizing high-value projects: Production brings direct revenue; safety measures don’t. When your organization spends time and budget only on high-value projects, it’s like putting on blinders so no one sees growing emergencies in long-term safety and infrastructural domains.
How Manufacturing Safety Protocols Can Seem at Odds With Speed
That list shows how ignoring safety can be dangerous. Actively writing off safety measures by reducing budgets for essential hardware like safety harnesses, a mezzanine gate, and dock gates, cutting safety and facility management teams, and devaluing safety-focused projects can be even more dangerous. Here are some potential safety investments that your organization might push down the line in the name of streamlining—and how each one actually increases productivity and profitability.
Safety Gates Around Stairs
An indoor safety gate around the top of stairs has a simple but important self-closing mechanism: it pushes open when you’re going up, and you need to pull the gate open if you’re going down. This creates a solid barrier around the drop-off to catch people if they trip so they don’t fall down the stairs. But when things are hustling and busy, it can be tempting to prop the gate open or just not install one at all.
Here’s how standard-sized and extended gates help streamlining efforts:
- Workers can walk faster without slowing down nervously around unprotected stairs.
- OSHA-compliant gates eliminate the risk of costly fines for initial and repeated offenses (as well as follow-up inspections that slow things down).
- Once you install an OSHA-compliant gate, your safety teams will have less work to do on follow-up audits and internal inspections.
Machine Guarding
New automation systems, robotics, and vertical picking tools are fast, but they need fall protection systems designed for machine guarding that your facility may not have had to consider before. Instead of making do without—or waiting until OSHA shows you need one in the form of fines—proactively install new machine guarding systems. Here are the benefits for your bottom line:
- A vastly reduced risk of OSHA or CCOHS fines.
- Fewer insurance claims and costly premiums increases.
- A better reputation for safety that increases your value as a vendor and an employer (which can help you access the shrinking talented labor pool without just hiking up salaries).
Loading Dock Gates and Barriers
Similar to installing an indoor safety gate around stairs, loading dock gates can seem like an impediment—workers have to open and close them every time they go through onto a truck. But they can improve your productivity metrics because:
- Workers can move faster and with more focus when they know they’re not next to an unprotected six-foot drop.
- A suitable dock gate allows your teams to keep the dock door wide open, giving them more ventilation to stave off heat sickness, lethargy, and injury.
Installing Barriers Around Mezzanine Perimeters and Raised Platforms
Mezzanine and raised floors in your warehouses and factories present a real danger for falls—and you need to have a solidly enclosed perimeter with a mezzanine gate and modular guardrails. Not doing so can present costs such as fines, slower work and lower employee confidence, and even reduced completion of maintenance and cleaning tasks that will eventually bog down your machinery.
Fabenco Has the Solutions You Need to Streamline Operations While Maintaining Safety
Streamlining manufacturing processes is an important strategy for remaining profitable in the emerging industry climate—but this emphasizes, not deemphasizes, the need for safety protocols that keep pace with changes and demands for faster production speeds. Fabenco’s fall protection solutions can help your facility stay compliant with OSHA, CCOHS, and local safety regulations, keeping your facility safe and optimally functional while reducing the risk of profit-eating fines. Contact us today to learn more about our indoor safety gate, machine guarding, mezzanine gate, and other manufacturing safety solutions.
