Safety Management Systems Give your Customers Confidence

Safety systems have evolved significantly and are requiring manufacturers to respond in an appropriate way.

Manufacturers once viewed safety systems as simple mechanistic shut-down functions, but they have developed into technologies such as safety capable logic, which can react to machine conditions and improve productivity.

To use modern safety systems and standards effectively, manufacturers and designers need new and improved tools. International safety standards provide quantitative methods to assess risk and reliability. There are a number of reasons why an organization would want to implement international safety standards. The most obvious reason being able to meet global requirements in order to lay down the foundations of future growth and expansion.

These days, European imported machines need to comply with either the International Standardizations (ISO) 13849-1 or the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 62061.

This positions manufacturers to take advantage of the framework provided by international safety standards to homogenise the operation of their plants around the world. It also leads to cost savings in training and maintenance as well as increased safety for workers and equipment.

Quantitative methods of ISO 13849-1:2015 and IEC/AS 62061:2005 can be quite useful for engineers who are looking to reasons for the need of any safety strategy system or needing to justify the requirement for further funding or the costs in the upgrade of organizational safety protocols and systems. These approaches give a clear distinct reasoning behind actual risk reduction. International standards provide companies the platform to showcase their compliance to customers which gives them confidence that their equipment and machinery will operate and function in a safe manner without compromising on quality. This can be mitigated by hiring engineers with Industry Body Functional Safety certifications.

The main consideration for engineers today is to choose a standard they feel comfortable working with and select safety systems that meet the requirements of the operating environment and machine function.

International standards are both supporters of global markets as well as safety technology systems. They also give designers the systems to measure risk and also ensure structured frameworks are available to implement safety lifecycle designs. There is currently no internal standard for work health and safety.  However by implementing an AS / NZS 4801 Safety Management System or and OHSAS 18001 management system companies can ensure that all safety aspects across their operations are effectively managed and monitored.