maintenance matters Ensure Worker Safety And Meet OSHA Regulations Using CMMS By: Paul Lachance CMMS can be called upon to automate preventative tasks, ensure worker safety. tions while fully integrating with work orders, PMs, assets and equipment. This OSH lets users create, track, re-view and monitor equipment, as well as safety programs for drills, evacuations, job safety analysis (JSA), historical safety meet-ing notes and material safety data sheets (MSDSs). Angelica’s Chicago plant uses CMMS to oversee these specific OSHA safety stan-dards, including: ■ Lock out/tag out: The system issues a notification to do an annual review T The disastrous events of West Fertilizer Company are a troubling reminder that safety hazards can go unchecked in high-risk work environments, in this case for nearly three decades. But even with increased enforcement of U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Ad-ministration (OSHA) workplace safety laws under the Obama Administration, there would still be a lack of auditors to perform the hundreds of thousands of inspections required throughout the country. True workplace safety comes from inter-nal audits and unflagging preventive main-tenance. Computer maintenance management systems (CMMS) have long been recog-nized for automating preventive mainte-nance tasks on operations equipment to improve asset uptime, performance, lon-gevity, labor efficiency, capital expense re-duction and more. It can also play a vital role when it comes to safety compliance and liability protection with OSHA. CMMS can act as a company’s internal inspector and ensure worker health and safety. CMMS allows all operating and mainte-nance manuals and OSHA guidelines to be linked to Angelica’s equipment records. Users can define inspection tasks, popu-late a PM calendar and set up automatic reminders to technicians assigned to com-plete the tasks. This supports uptime and a lean operat-ing environment, while satisfying compli-ance requirements. There are even add-on Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) solutions to han-dle safety, audits, incidents and inspec-Keeping Inspectors At Bay At Angelica, one of the largest textile and linen rental companies serving the U.S. healthcare market, the Chicago plant com-pletes a dozen health and safety related tasks per week to comply with OSHA and be prepared for unannounced inspections. Angelica uses CMMS at each of its 27 plants, which house industrial washers and dryers, ironing and folding machines, boil-ers, fire pumps and heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) units. The company delivers more than 750 mil-lion pounds of clean laundry to healthcare facilities nationwide. Image courtesy of RobertKyllo/iStockphoto/Thinkstock With random visits from OSHA auditors, CMMS can give maintenance and safety man-agers the ability to show strong record keeping of preventive maintenance on demand. 40 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® • June 2013
CMM – Archives June 2013: 40
