Tag Archives: manufacturing

OSHA Issues Emergency Temporary Standard to Protect Healthcare Workers from COVID-19

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The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced on June 10 it will issue an emergency temporary standard (ETS) to protect healthcare workers from contracting coronavirus. The standard focuses on healthcare workers most likely to have contact with someone infected with the virus.

In addition to the healthcare-focused ETS, OSHA is issuing updated guidance to help employers and workers in other industries protect workers who are still not vaccinated, with a special emphasis on other industries noted for prolonged close-contacts like meat processing, manufacturing, seafood and grocery and high-volume retail. The agency also issued a new general industry guidance, and both the guidance and the ETS are aligned with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Too many of our frontline healthcare workers continue to be at high risk of contracting the coronavirus,” said U.S. Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh. “As I said when … Read more...

How 5G Technology will Revolutionize the Manufacturing Industry

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5G Technology Tech Tuesdays

In the words of author Sukant Ratnakar: “Our future success is directly proportional to our ability to understand, adopt and integrate new technology into our work.” While there are many who believe that technology is the engine behind driving progress, there are others who view these advancements are a sign of the end of humanity. 5G technology, while at its infancy from a widespread adoption perspective, just happens to be one of them.

Let’s demystify 5G technology, and explore its impacts to the manufacturing sector, with a special focus on the manufacturing safety.


The Basics of 5G Technology


5G technology, because it’s the fifth generation of wireless networking technology, can hyper-accelerate the speed of mobile phones to approximately 10 gigabits per second. To put it into context, this is more than 600X faster that today’s 4G-powered phones. On top of that, it serves as a catalyst … Read more...

Enhance Your Health and Safety Strategy by Incorporating Insights from ISO 45001:2018

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Driving performance with ISO 45001:2018.
With ever-changing regulations in the health and safety landscape, it’s critical for organizations to stay abreast of new and updated safety standards. By incorporating ISO standard updates to internal policies and practices, companies will be able to reduce risk and demonstrate compliance, and ultimately move towards operational excellence.

Of course, that is only part of the equation. Let’s take a step back to understand all that is involved in creating a sustainable health and safety strategy for your organization.

Taking Your Health and Safety Strategy to the Next Level | A Multi-Faceted Approach

In order to develop an effective strategy, experts recommend that your organization starts with a solid safety management system, which includes “models for coordinating people, processes, technologies … and data.” Within this, best practice dictates that you incorporate the key new elements of ISO 45001:2018, specifically:

• Promote the integration of OH&S
… Read more...

Manufacturer Exits Paper Trail – Moves to a Software Path for Better EHS Management

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It was really a matter of getting with the times.

PACE Industries, a U.S.-based die-casting company, was not unlike many organizations struggling to manage environmental, health and safety (EHS) processes. They were looking to get out of the old world of paper and Excel spreadsheets and into the modern age of intelligent digital reporting.

A company with a history dating to the 1970s, PACE was buried under a spreadsheet mountain of incident reporting from 12 divisions and 21 locations throughout the U.S., plus two plants in Mexico. It’s a busy place. You name it, and PACE probably manufactures it, taking aluminum, magnesium and zinc, melting it down, putting it in high-pressure molds, and literally turning it into thousands of parts. Everything from components for the automotive and lighting industries, to barbecue grills, and even guidance chips for missile systems. Suffice to say, paper-based processes simply weren’t cutting it.

“We wanted … Read more...

ISO 45001 May Be Particularly Beneficial to Manufacturing

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ISO 45001 will heap a whole lot more responsibility on to the already full plates of top managers. The standard puts business management on the hook to create, orchestrate, maintain, monitor, develop and actively promote a system that takes occupational health and safety (OH&S) policies and embeds these into the culture and operation of a business’s everyday activities. The corollary to this is that leaders will need to find a way to ensure sufficient financial, personnel and time resources are devoted to the successful implementation of a management system for OH&S.

At the heart of the ISO 45001 standard is a need for worker involvement through participation in decision making, evaluation procedures, implementation and feedback mechanisms.

The new standard will amplify a need for an effective safety solution, including tools that will allow manufacturers to connect with different stakeholders throughout their organizations, to foster trust and collaboration at each level.… Read more...

How a Safety Management System Can Save You Money

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A software-based system for managing safety in manufacturing organizations may hold the key to unlocking efficiency, improving processes and creating safer workplaces that, at the end of the day, puts money back in the pockets of these businesses.

Experts say that Safety Management System (SMS) support the ability of manufacturing companies to help change leadership thinking and cultures in reducing the number of workplace injuries through increased awareness of, and involvement in, safety programs, and ultimately elevating the important of and commitment to safety across entire organizations.

In the U.S. a total of US$170 billion is spent by business each year on occupational injury- and illness-related costs that eat away at net earnings. The National Safety Council reports that a dollar invested in an SMS – and the subsequent potential improvements that can be achieved in overall safety management – returns anywhere from between $2 and $6. These savings come … Read more...

4 Best Practices for Life Science Manufacturers to Manage Risk

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Managing risk for life science organizations is often seen as simply a way to achieve and maintain industry compliance, and not as a means to improving operational performance.

That’s far from the perception in other industries, where effective risk management also supports continuous improvement and competitive differentiation.

Industry leaders in risk management are committed to continuous improvement programs, which drive down risks on existing products. The reality today is that the changing nature of risks requires adopting effective strategies to properly prioritize and mitigate them.

Arguably life science manufacturers should adopt a similar approach that takes advantage of best practices from across industries.

To that end, manufacturers should focus on:

Using a single unified framework for risk management

A unified framework allows the ability to compare risks, and execute continuous improvement measures. Many possible risk models exist, such as failure modes/failure effects/causes/controls/verification, or hazards/harms/controls/consequences. A unified model allows manufacturers to … Read more...

How to Save $1.2 Million in Workers Compensation Dollars

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Blog Image_PaceIndustries_450Pace Industries is North America’s largest full-service aluminum, zinc, and magnesium die casting company. Founded in 1970, Pace operates 12 divisions with 21 facilities and over 4,200 associates across the U.S. and Mexico. Today, their safety performance is a source of pride and a competitive advantage within their industry. But Pace Industries has learned a lot along the way.

Pace Industries focuses on building a strong safety culture in a number of ways, from committing to personal safety pledges to investing in safety by providing appropriate resources, training and education. “We challenged our leadership team to give our EHS personnel more responsibility,” says Kenny Sandlin, Vice President of Health & Safety at Pace Industries. “To give them authority, to empower them, but also to give them resources. Intelex was one of those resources.”

Barriers to Safety Excellence

Not too long ago, the majority of Pace Industries’ safety data was still … Read more...

Taking your manufacturing ERP to the Cloud

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It seems as though everything is moving towards the “Cloud” these days. But uploading pictures from your latest vacation vs. moving your manufacturing company’s business ERP system to the Cloud are two very different things with two completely different sets of challenges. The question that arises for the latter is if a Cloud-based ERP can even handle specific manufacturing needs such as detailed production tracking, production scheduling and product traceability. According to Mark Symond’s recent article, Software & Analysis: Cloud ERP Meets Manufacturing from Quality Magazine, the answer is yes.

Mark outlines many of the benefits of Cloud-based ERP systems, the related trend of software as a service (SaaS) and how they mitigate several pain points of traditional on-premise solutions. Key benefits include avoiding the challenges associated with updating software versions when vendors push out new releases, eliminating the internal IT resources required to maintain software in-house and being able … Read more...

Corporate recycling, sunny side-up

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Food manufacturing and packaging go hand in hand.  What may not be so obvious, however, is that the links between the two are about to become a lot more, er, ineggstricable. That’s right, thanks to some pioneering work out of England, we’ve learned that eggs themselves may contain the answers to some of the world’s environmental woes. 

Scientists out of the University of Leicester in England are currently investigating the use of disposed eggshells, which currently either end up in landfill or are used in pharmaceuticals to help with cartilage and connective tissue problems. The biodegradable proteins found in the egg shell can be potentially formed into a starch-based plastic very similar to numerous forms of existing materials used in packaging warehouses. Sounds simple, but the outcome could bring great change to the packaging world. Find out more here

As the article explains: The aim of the current project … Read more...