The mantra “safety first” can achieve zero recordable incidents when digital tools are put in place.
Learning objectives
- Understand how digitalization supports hazard reduction by enabling safer equipment monitoring, diagnostics and real-time alerts that reduce worker exposure.
- Recognize the role of digital tools in advancing safety practices in accordance with NFPA 70B and NFPA 70E, particularly through data-driven decisions and virtual training.
- Grasp how integrated digital strategies improve both safety and productivity by minimizing unplanned work, enhancing situational awareness and informing PPE use and procedural readiness.
Safety insights
- This article highlights how digitalization enhances safety by reducing worker exposure through real-time monitoring, diagnostics and alerts.
- By integrating digital tools into operations, facilities can strengthen safety programs, meet standards like NFPA 70B and 70E and improve both preparedness and productivity.
Putting digitalization to work provides a powerful lever to enhance electrical safety. The ability to bring information in, aggregate it in one place and make it available for personnel can reduce exposure to hazards. In other words, active digital correlation can help teams be better prepared when they need to interact with electrical equipment.
Safety is a foundational and operational concern for industrial facilities and manufacturers. Impacting safety requires the right education, training and controls to eliminate or reduce hazards. The hierarchy of controls from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health provides guidance in preferred order. Fundamentally, safety programs must seek to eliminate hazards and keep people out of harm’s way and digitalization provides vital tools to do just that.
Five strategies moving the needle on safety
Getting to zero total recordable incident or case rate requires the ability to identify potential issues and avert them. Here are five proven digital strategies that can reduce risk and avoid unplanned or irregular work:
1. Monitoring equipment: sensors as digital watchdogs
Watching for problems in electrical and mechanical systems is important and digital monitoring provides a powerful tool to understand assets and environmental conditions. Digitalization allows this to be accomplished safely without exposure to equipment or environment — reducing risk and providing insights on changes to conditions and equipment performance.
Further, digital equipment monitoring helps reduce complexity and risk. Complicated repairs create added risk exposure and typically have greater potential for injury. For example, hoisting is a dangerous process from an environmental health and safety perspective.
However, if an electric motor can be repaired early because of motor health predictions from motor analytics software or health-related warnings from an intelligent motor starter, it may be a simpler repair. Otherwise, if a motor fails, it will likely need to be hoisted out for replacement. In other words, having information as a situation develops can help reduce the risk of injury.
2. Diagnostics: recognize unsafe conditions without walking into them
There is widely recognized value in keeping people out of harm’s way. It’s why NFPA 70B: Standard for Electrical Equipment Maintenance became a standard, not just a recommendation. This standard is considered the minimum requirement for safe electrical work procedures and Occupational Health and Safety Administration can use this as the basis for issuing citations.
Digital tools allow plant managers and safety experts to keep tabs on things that have traditionally gone unmonitored or only observed occasionally such as on a cycle, which can help meet NFPA 70B and impact safety. Specifically, condition monitoring systems allow plant and maintenance managers to make smarter maintenance decisions based on actual equipment and environmental data, which can help determine the root cause of a problem. Digitalization enables workers to identify unsafe conditions as they develop and detect problems in areas that are hard or unsafe to access.
3. Alerts and alarms are safety game changers
Don’t underestimate the value of the right notification at the right time to the right people. The root cause of many recordables or near misses is complacency, distraction, insufficient knowledge and lack of planning. Digitalization can provide the needed notifications to avoid these issues and enable teams to plan for various scenarios.
Given that there’s so much data available, how is a worker able to act on it at the right moment? Safety requires urgency and that’s exactly where alerts come in. Blinking red lights and horns are insufficient and trending data also misses the mark — alerts need to deliver tangible information at the right moment. Plant managers need to know when a situation reaches a certain threshold and immediate action is needed.
Importantly, alerts are modeled on a set of criteria, helping establish what action needs to occur well before a situation arises. In other words, setting alerts enables staff to act faster and smarter because it can better pre-plan what needs to happen in a variety of given situations.
4. Informing the last line of defense
Ready access to the right personal protective equipment (PPE) requirements is not easy, especially as requirements will invariably change as conditions evolve. Sometimes, there is no sufficient level of PPE. Personnel need tools to avoid dangerous conditions and situations in the first place.
A digital dashboard view can flag safety issues and provide recommendations that reflect real-time conditions — whether it’s for the appropriate level of PPE or to avert exposure. And the needed PPE can be identified via an alert to help ensure personnel are prepared with the proper equipment before starting work.
For example, in a situation with dangerous gases and a high-pressure environment, the need to detect exposure in real time is vital, before personnel ever enter the room. Digitalization enables a team to turn to planned, safe work practice responses, including wearing the right personal hazard detection monitor devices, if needed.
5. Hands-on learning in a safe environment
Digital tools can empower teams with experiential training and tutorials enabling familiarity with equipment and proper procedures to advance safety. For example, manufacturing teams can learn how to safely operate equipment in a virtual environment, getting a tutorial on how to open, close and rack circuit breakers and operating switches and more.
Further, digital solutions can support testing required for qualified workers per NFPA 70E: Standard for Electrical Safety in the Workplace. This provides team members with feedback on specific tasks required for procedures like lockout/tagout, helping ensure that safety analysis, protective barriers, required PPE and verification for the absence of voltage are all conducted appropriately. In other words, digitalization also provides vital tools to help team members gain experience and get feedback to advance safety — helping protect people, equipment and processes.
Digitalization helps plant workers become better prepared from a safety perspective, getting a deeper and broader understanding of conditions that impact safety and whether a facility needs to update or change its strategy for a specific situation. It is important to note that digitalization has an important role to play across multiple key performance indicators — including safety, maintenance and productivity — so there are fewer accidents, improved quality and less rework and waste. The good news is that some of the things that make workers safer also make them more productive, and vice versa.
