Mark Hammar
November 16, 2016
A machine shop can be a dangerous place. With all of the heavyweight machinery, moving parts, and heavy steels and other materials it is no wonder that the safety of everyone present needs to be forefront in everyone’s mind. However, safety in a machine shop is more than just putting up some posters reminding people to work safely; you need to have some way to track that everyone is maintaining a safe environment. This is where key performance indicators (KPIs) can be invaluable.
It is for this better control over employee health & safety that companies are going beyond their legal requirements for workplace safety and using the requirements of OHSAS 18001 to implement an Occupational Health & Safety Management System (OH&SMS). By putting a system in place that formalizes your process controls with respect to OH&S, and tracking these controls to know they are being maintained, you can better identify a problem before it happens and prevent injury or loss of life. KPIs are what are put in place to track these process controls.
OHSAS 18001, as well as the new draft international standard 45001 that is set to replace it, does not use the term “key performance indicator.” Still, there are requirements for operational planning and control and performance evaluation that necessitate knowing the OH&S criteria of your processes, and assessing that processes have been carried out as planned. The KPI for a process is just such a monitoring tool.
So, what is a key performance indicator? Quite simply, it is an aspect of your process that you can measure and monitor against a set of criteria for acceptance. This can be as simple as having an overall criterion for safety of zero lost time due to accidents per month, which you track. If you meet this target, your overall OH&S criteria are met, and you can say that your performance is as expected. If you do have a lost-time accident, then you do not meet your criteria and you need to take some corrective action to address the problem. The KPI tells you that corrective action is needed when you do not meet your expected target.
For more information on using corrective actions in the OH&SMS, see this article on 5 steps to take once a corrective action is initiated in your OHSAS 18001.
Of course, no company wants to have any accidents that result in employees taking time off work, and any accident that causes lost time will be investigated for corrective action, so this is really a KPI that any company has even if they do not know they have it. So, what are some other KPIs that could be put in place in a machine shop that can monitor the environment for health & safety, and potentially even help to avoid accidents?
Here are a few to consider:
It is important to note that there can be some reluctance to monitor incidents such as near misses and minor injuries, since people can sometimes think that this will be used in order to assign blame or punish employees. As management, you need to work to remove this fear, because your commitment to occupational health & safety improvement can only come if you know the facts, so that you can correct systematic problems before they become deadly hazards.
To make good decisions, you need to have good data to drive those decisions; good corrective actions and continual improvement depend on you getting the right information.
To help you make your case for implementing OHSAS 18001, why not check out this free presentation Project proposal for OHSAS 18001 Implementation.