Digital tools improve safety, efficiency of machine lockouts
Any industrial or research company that operates machinery that has the potential to cause injuries must properly shut down and limit access to hazardous energy sources while equipment is being repaired or serviced.
This industrial world seems to have plenty of room for improvement in this area. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), 10% of all workplace accidents result from a failure to control hazardous energy, and exposure to the same causes an average of 24 lost workdays for each injured employee.
Electrical, mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, chemical and thermal are common sources of potentially hazardous energy, but companies must also account for stored energy like tension in a spring, a charged capacitor or compressed gas and air.
Meeting the regulations
“Lock Out, Tag Out” (LOTO) is a familiar term for companies that operate industrial machinery. The term describes a set of procedures they must follow to ensure that equipment is properly shut down and rendered inoperable until planned maintenance or repairs are completed.
Even routine tasks like lubricating, cleaning or changing attachments must follow LOTO procedures.
Federal OSHA regulations (CFR 29, PART 1910.47) have general requirements for hazardous energy sources to be "isolated and rendered inoperative" before work is started. The agency estimates that complying with LOTO procedures is directly responsible for preventing around 120 fatalities and 50,000 injuries each year.
OSHA regulations do give specifics for how to render energy sources inoperative, but all machines have control points that can be locked down and tagged such as valves, switches, breakers and plugs.
In addition to locking out the control points, a tag must be placed on the lock to identify the worker who placed it. Besides locking out access to energy sources, many companies put LOTO devices on things like robotic arms, moveable saw blades, crushing parts or anything that can move unexpectedly.
In many workplaces, the employee who placed the lock maintains control of the key. This is done to ensure that no other person can remove the lock and start the machine before the work is completed.
A new way to digitize lockouts
OSHA’s guidelines for LOTO devices and tags require their only use be for controlling access to energy. This is done to prevent employees from confusing LOTO devices with other locks or tags that are being used for different purposes in a workplace.
A lockout or a tag must identify the authorized employee who installed them and be made from durable materials that are substantial enough to prevent removal by unauthorized people.
BoxLock smart padlocks are ideally suited for LOTO applications. Besides being durable, the technology has digital tools that make what has traditionally been a very manual and cumbersome process both safer and more efficient.
Standard LOTO devices are susceptible to employees losing or misplacing keys and gaps in the record keeping.
Companies that use BoxLock devices can assign them to individual employees. To set a lockout, the employee can use his or her device(s) to capture a unique QR code on an employee ID badge. The integrated scanners in the device captures the time and date stamp for each event.
Similarly, an employee would scan a unique QR code to open and remove a lock when the maintenance or service event is completed. When the employee who applied the lock is not at the site, but the work is completed, a supervisor could use a unique QR code to gain access and remove the lock by following proper procedures.
BoxLock devices are connected through Wi-Fi or cellular networks to a robust cloud-based platform with a full suite of access control, audit log and management tools. By implementing a digitized LOTO process, companies have better access controls and an immutable audit log of events.
For more information about how BoxLock technology works for LOTO and other industrial and B2B applications, visit www.getboxlock.com