Sustainability Requires Safety
Trying to ramp up your sustainable production efforts? Safety is a critical component to your success.
By Marcia Walker, Program Manager, and Dan Hornbeck, Safety Market Development Manager, Rockwell Automation
Safety is a key area that can influence success in your sustainable production efforts. Machine safety technologies promote sustainable production by emphasizing global standards, innovative technologies, trained personnel and ongoing risk assessment as best practices to support and maintain future production. Achieving sustainable production requires you to understand that corporate investment in environmental and social responsibility strengthens business performance and improves the bottom line. Certainly goodwill is part of the motivation, but real economic imperatives also exist. For example, it offers one of the best long-term solutions to overcoming rising energy and raw material costs, and for managing other operational costs such as workers’ compensation, lost worker productivity and product liability.
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Adhering to the safety values inherent in sustainable production can help you to improve brand reputation. Consumers are increasingly demanding that manufacturers practice social responsibility in making their products. This includes keeping workers safer, contributing to a healthy environment, and effectively managing product safety through tracking-and-tracing systems, robust supply chain transparency and effective recall systems.
Flexible Systems Help Keep People Safer
Beyond brand reputation, you have a vested interest in sustaining your organization and your neighbourhood. One way to accomplish this is to leverage high-performance, flexible automation systems with contemporary, integrated safety solutions in manufacturing facilities. Many of today’s legacy manufacturing applications use dated methods and technologies. Some of these applications use a ’black box’ approach to safety where the safety solution was separate from the automation system. Machines often had to come to a full stop and be in a safe state before repair or maintenance could be completed. Operators and maintenance personnel often bypassed safety systems to maintain productivity, risking their own well-being in the process. Still other systems were developed with an eye towards safety, but were implemented in a way that negatively impacted productivity — opting for a ’trade-off’ mentality that resulted in neither safety nor production being fully optimised. Such risks are no longer acceptable — or necessary — thanks to new global standards, technological innovation and risk management. Today’s safety automation systems help provide a safer environment for employees, reduced environmental impact, better processes and optimised productivity. You now can allow operators to more safely perform operational tasks while a machine is running and possibly in motion. For example, new safe-speed control technology allows you to reduce and monitor the machine’s speed so operators can remove jams and perform other maintenance work without completely stopping the machine. This helps improve productivity and saves excess energy necessary to power-up a machine, which in turn reduces overall energy consumption.
“Sustainable production doesn’t need to be an either/or proposition between social responsibility and profitability” |
Product Safety Requires the Ability to Respond
Another key requirement of sustainable production is the ability to support the safety of your own product lines, including effectively handling product recalls. Recent news headlines citing recalls of prescription drugs, ground beef, vegetables, toys and other products demonstrate the importance of full supply-chain tracking and traceability.Using advanced information software, you can track and record data at every step of the process to pinpoint when and where resources were used, such as raw materials, people, equipment or utilities, and the actions taken during each step of production. These systems help automate track-and-trace procedures of product genealogy through the full chain of custody. This helps you comply, document
and respond to recalls faster and more efficiently.
Ideally, a robust tracking system can identify and lock down affected products before they reach the supply chain, thus helping to eliminate recalls and their associated costs.
A Wide Perspective
Sustainable production doesn’t need to be an either/or proposition between social responsibility and profitability. Business leaders who ’see the big picture’ understand that sustainable production practices help optimize resources, improve productivity and meet the company’s social responsibility to the community. Investing in and adhering to the values of sustainable production is a smart and responsible business practice. Sustainable production practices help you improve employee morale, brand reputation, global competitiveness, and profitability while sustaining both the corporation and the environment.
For more information, please e-mail us at: info_at@ra.rockwell.com with ref: Sustainability
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