What is Safety in Maintenance?

Ensuring your maintenance team’s health and safety is critical for your
organization to avoid hazards, illnesses, and injuries. In addition, manufacturers
often cite safety controls as even more important than profitability because their
safety programs impact all parts of the business, from compliance to employee
retention to production line efficiency.

This guide explains why ensuring your maintenance team’s health and safety is
essential, the rules to be mindful of, and how a CMMS can help.

“Workplace health and safety is all about sensibly managing risks to protect your

workers and your business. Good health and safety management is characterised by

strong leadership involving your managers, workers, suppliers, contractors and

customers.”

IOSH
Safety in maintenance is about providing a work environment free of risks associated
with maintenance activities.

The nature of maintenance work requires proper planning and technicians to perform
unusual and non-routine tasks, often in exceptional conditions or confined spaces.
For example, technicians may need to disassemble and reassemble machinery or
work in extreme temperatures. In addition, maintenance technicians often need to
work under time pressure because downtime is expensive, increasing the risk of
injury.

Profitability is one thing, but putting safety measures in place and providing
employees with safe environments is an ethical responsibility.

What Are the Safety Rules during Maintenance?

Three rules to follow to ensure workplace safety for your maintenance technicians
are:

1. Provide Appropriate Equipment and Tools

Your maintenance team needs various tools and equipment to perform maintenance
tasks safely. For example, you should provide personal protective equipment
(PPE) to protect them against exposure to hazardous substances like asbestos or
pesticides.

The equipment should have instructions to minimize the risk of injury from improper
operation. Lockout Tagout instructions are an excellent example. Lockout Tagout is
a safety procedure that ensures maintenance technicians completely shut down
hazardous equipment while completing repair work.

The maintenance team should be trained to determine if the equipment is suitable for
a specific environment. For example, your team should never use a sparking tool in
a flammable environment.

Also, always consider the technician’s health when providing a piece of equipment.
Finally, ensure the equipment is ergonomic and fits the technician well with the
proper adjustments.

2. Provide Access to Complete Information

Making sure critical information and safety guidelines are visible across the shop
floor is critical to ensure worker safety. Placing barriers and signs to mark hazardous
areas and prevent unauthorized access to those work areas is a good starting point.
The areas on the shopfloor must be clean, and technicians should have a safe route
to enter and exit the site wherever they need to perform maintenance. In addition,
repair locations should have temporary ventilation and a proper lockout to protect the
machinery.

Work orders should include photos and diagram labels explaining all safety
procedures necessary to perform maintenance. For example, pressing the wrong
switch can lead to an accident that could’ve been easily avoided with a safety label.

Technicians should also have access to maintenance and repair history to identify
potential issues and previous accidents. While these health and safety measures
may seem complicated, a computerized maintenance management system
(CMMS) can help ensure technicians have all the information at their fingertips.

3. Provide Thorough Safety Instructions

Ensure technicians access maintenance health and safety instructions for all
maintenance tasks. When creating work orders, include safety instructions for each
task and be specific. Add instructions to handle each machine part and high-risk
activity required to complete the maintenance task.

Each task should have an expected duration. Each procedure should end with a test
confirming the machine is safe for others to use. If the technician has questions
about a maintenance task, they should be able to reach out to you or a relevant
person for help. Using a CMMS with in-app chat capabilities ensures the safety of
maintenance workers.
Why Is Maintenance Important for Safety?
Maintenance ensures equipment reliability. Improperly maintained machinery can be
unreliable and become faulty. Fewer instances of breakdowns or potential issues
translate to reduced contact with machinery. Maintenance is key in detecting faults
early.

Maintenance for safety reasons is also a regulatory

requirement. OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) has guidelines
for the U.S. Other countries also provide workplace safety regulations. For
example, CCOHS (the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety ) and
the UK’s PUWER (Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998) also
regulate workplace safety and health.

What Are the Four Types of Maintenance?

You can implement four types of regular maintenance operations at your factory.
However, it’s best to use multiple types of maintenance approaches based on the
type of assets and maintenance safety requirements.

1. Corrective Maintenance

Corrective maintenance involves detecting a problem using non-destructive testing

techniques like ultrasonic testing and vibration analysis. Corrective maintenance
ensures the issue is addressed before it escalates.

2. Preventive Maintenance
Preventive maintenance involves scheduling maintenance tasks to ensure problems
are addressed before they occur. For example, tasks like lubrication, cleaning, and
spare parts inspection are completed at a predefined frequency to avoid issues or
breakdowns.

3. Condition-Based Maintenance

Condition-based maintenance involves using specialized equipment and IoT devices

to detect problems using signals like temperature and sound frequencies. Unlike
preventive maintenance, condition-based maintenance is performed on an as-
needed basis.

4. Predictive Maintenance
Predictive maintenance involves monitoring the equipment’s condition and predicting
potential failure based on the collected data. The idea is similar to condition-based
maintenance, except that the predictive maintenance algorithm tries to predict the
possibility of future failures.

Use MaintainX to Ensure Health and Safety

MaintainX is a mobile-friendly CMMS that helps you implement safety measures
more efficiently. For example, a manager can create and assign reactive work order
procedures during an emergency from the spot of the breakdown, eliminating the
time needed to get back to the office and assign a team.

Also, all safety procedures for that particular asset can be attached to the work
order. Once the machine is back up, technicians using the digital work order can
upload pictures after completing the repair, automatically storing this data in the
cloud.

With a CMMS, technicians have complete visibility over repair and maintenance
history. In addition, they can view all maintenance activities using MaintainX on their
mobile phone and use the built-in chat feature in case they have questions. If that
sounds interesting, try MaintainX for free today.

FAQs
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Caroline Eisner
Caroline Eisner is a writer and editor with experience across the profit and nonprofit
sectors, government, education, and financial organizations. She has held
leadership positions in K16 institutions and has led large-scale digital projects,
interactive websites, and a business writing consultancy.