Safe, Efficient, Profitable: A Worker Safety Podcast
Joe and Jen Allen of Allen Safety LLC take their combined 40+ years of worker safety, OSHA, EPA, production, sanitation, and engineering experience in Manufacturing Plants including Harvest Plants/Packers, Case Readies and Further Processing Plants, Food Production Plants, Feed Mills, Grain Elevators, Bakeries, Farms, Feed Lots, and Petro-Chemical and bring you their top methods for identifying risk, preventing injuries, conquering the workload, auditing, managing emergencies and catastrophic events, and working through OSHA citations. They're breaking down real safety opportunities, safety citations, and emergency situations from real locations, and discussing realistic solutions that can actually be implement based on their personal experiences spending 40+ weeks in the field every year since 2001. Joe and Jen are using all of that experience to provide a fresh outlook on worker safety by providing honest, (no sponsors here!) and straight forward, easy to understand safety coaching with actionable guidance to move your safety program forward in a way that provides tangible results.
Safe, Efficient, Profitable: A Worker Safety Podcast
#41:Top Ai Worker Safety Risks & What to Do About Them
In this episode of the Worker Safety Podcast, hosts Joe and Jen, representing their safety company, delve into the complexities of working with robots and the crucial safety considerations associated with them. Having previously discussed the advantages of incorporating robots into the workplace, this episode breaks down the essential safety aspects to be aware of before installing or working with robots.
Key Highlights:
🚀 Deep Dive into the World of Robots:
As we navigate the intricate landscape of robotic assistance, Joe and Jen, armed with their extensive safety expertise, shed light on the nuanced challenges and imperative safety measures associated with these automated colleagues. Their insights promise to be invaluable for both novices contemplating the integration of robots and seasoned professionals seeking a nuanced understanding of the evolving safety landscape.
🛠️ Breaking Down Safety Essentials:
Delving into the core of our discussion, this episode meticulously breaks down the fundamental safety aspects that demand our attention before, during, and after the installation of robots in the workplace. From training dilemmas to technical challenges, the hosts leave no stone unturned in unraveling the layers of complexity surrounding human-robot interactions.
🔍 Essential Takeaways:
Listeners can anticipate a treasure trove of essential takeaways, including insights into the unique training requirements for personnel handling robot maintenance and troubleshooting. The hosts underscore the significance of understanding how humans interface with robots on a daily basis, emphasizing the need for a profound grasp of motion ranges, control points, and potential hazards.
🤯 Technical Challenges Explored:
The episode doesn't shy away from delving into the technical challenges posed by robots. From shutdown procedures to override systems in technologically advanced environments, Joe and Jen guide listeners through the labyrinth of maintaining safety protocols while avoiding prolonged downtimes.
💡 Guidance for Risk Assessment and Lockout:
Risk assessment and lockout procedures take center stage, providing practical guidance on evaluating downtime feasibility, considering technology overrides, and managing potential risks. Varied interpretations of machine guarding are also explored, underlining the importance of multiple safety measures tailored to diverse work environments.
🌐 Global Perspectives and Collaborative Solutions:
Acknowledging the global nature of technological advancements, the hosts touch upon challenges associated with overseas equipment. They emphasize the need for collaboration and the translation of safety procedures for international robots, ensuring a cohesive approach to safety standards across borders.
👩💻 Human Factor and Continuous Training:
In a world where robots are only as effective as the humans managing them, the hosts advocate for ongoing training. They stress the significance of understanding robot behavior, identifying abnormalities, and addressing safety concerns proactively.
🔗 For a deeper dive into safety topics and comprehensive coaching sessions, visit our sponsor: AllensSafetyCoaching.com or www.allen-safety.com for in person training and safety services.
Worker Safety
Robot Safety
Safety Considerations
Human-Robot Interaction
Shutdown Procedures
Override Systems
Risk Assessment
Lockout Procedures
Machine Guarding
Safety Protocols
Ongoing Training
Workplace Safety
Technology Integration
Safety Hazards
Safety Protocols for Robots
Advanced Technology Safety
Downtime Feasibility
Collaborative Safety
Welcome back for our first time viewers. This is Joe. This is Jen.
Speaker 2:And we're a safety company. Here goes our podcast.
Speaker 1:We are talking about robots and worker safety. And how they interrelate Yep, last week we were talking about some of the pros and why you might wanna look at getting a robot. This is where we break down if you have one or some of the safety considerations to think about while you're working on them or before you install Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Here we go. So this one is where breaking down some of the top considerations from a safety standpoint that you wanna think about if you're getting ready to install robots or you already have them at your property. A lot of our facilities have robots or looking at installing them, and so you just wanna check these critical things. So all right, let's go.
Speaker 2:So the positive about having a robot they show up to work, take vacation, they don't need breaks, they don't need lunch yeah they don't get on conference call 24 seven. Yeah, they're no meetings.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no safety training for them.
Speaker 2:All right. So here's the thing, though, but the robots are hard to train, so what you have to train is the person.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And training the person to work around a robot is completely different than training to work around another person.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the robot program is going to do whatever you put in there.
Speaker 2:It doesn't know if you're a boxer or human.
Speaker 1:It's gonna do the program. It's gonna be the program, so that means some additional training for the folks that are handling the robots, whether it be doing PMs or doing repair and maintenance work troubleshooting.
Speaker 2:For those of you don't know as much, we spent some time working robots in different countries and we've worked around them our whole life in the career field, and one of the things we have to do is we look at how the robot moves daily, like how the actual motion, range of motion, where the control, where's the human have to interface with that and interacting for the humans like you said, around that area.
Speaker 1:We still have employees working in that immediate area, up to and including working on that robot.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. If the robot is a boxing robot and it's job is to put boxes on a pallet and it drops one, the robot can't pick it up.
Speaker 1:No, because it's usually out of the sequence. The robot's program, to put it, it's out of the sequence.
Speaker 2:So the human picks up. Well, now the human's in the range of activity of the robot. So now you go back to how do you manage it? And years ago we would say like I tagged us. The way you manage it but now you will see more and more as the computer systems come online in the States is that people don't want to turn off the computer because it takes a long to reboot the computer. So it's basically like your phone's not working, you turn it off, you wait, you have to turn on. You would never do that in the middle of something important because you'd worry about being down and not be able to get. Well, the same basic idea happens with the computers. So what'll happen? It could be 30 minutes or 40 minutes for the systems because they're so high tech.
Speaker 1:Now, it takes a lot. It's longer than you think.
Speaker 2:it is yes, so I actually put that in our shutdown procedures. How long is it gonna take?
Speaker 1:Yeah, because there is this weird need to be like well, I know it's gonna take a long time, but I'm gonna just go get that real quick.
Speaker 2:Correct. So we have to analyze how long it's gonna take if the computer will be down. We have to analyze this the computer down even feasible really. And then what are the safeguards can we put in place to protect that person if they go get that box?
Speaker 1:Yeah, or whatever it is. Maybe it's split saws, whatever it is.
Speaker 2:How are we?
Speaker 1:gonna manage that.
Speaker 2:So that's one control. So the one is evaluating what the lockout may look like, how the computer's gonna be, what the downtime or down for that, and then how do we manage train, which means that training for that is gonna be different than any train they have, because they've got to maybe wait for a sequence on the robot. Maybe it takes two people now with two different controls. Maybe it takes these, the fancier key systems where you have to do interlock keys to a door so the robot gets signals that it can't do. So I mean there's more to it than just lock out when it comes to those kind of procedures.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of technical things happening with that. So there's certain times you can shut certain systems down and it's fine. But you've also gotta recognize what risk is that to my employee if I don't totally got everything down.
Speaker 2:All right, legal disclaimer this is our opinions.
Speaker 1:This is based on our experience. So you know we haven't seen everything there is out there, but we've seen quite a bit. That's why we're talking about it today. We've seen quite a bit over 24 years. So here we are. Just make sure you're doing a thorough risk assessment and evaluating everything, because each circumstance is a little different.
Speaker 2:It is. So now you take a computer and it turns on, and now you go to set up a piece of equipment and the rule says lock it out before you set up the piece of equipment. But that particular machine needs air, needs hydraulics, needs pneumatics to do the setup.
Speaker 1:Now who wrote the lockup procedure for it? Because to me that's huge If it wasn't the person that was the installer or if it was the installer. But they're not super familiar with OSHA stuff, so maybe they're from overseas.
Speaker 2:They want limit switches, yeah, they rely on limit switches, yeah they do a lot overseas.
Speaker 1:So if you have overseas equipment and robots getting put into your plant, they may or may not be able to help a lot with writing those procedures and so it's going to take someone basically to translate. Okay, I understand the equipment, I understand how this works, and now I understand how to translate that into a lockout procedure that is acceptable for over here you will see people say, well, just lock out an E-stop.
Speaker 2:Well, you can lock everything else that will lead the air out, but it's still a hazard. It's still point of operation. You got to look at the hazard. Yeah, you got to look at your procedures. That's going to make sense.
Speaker 1:How do we meet the intent of lockout, which is not exposing the employee to the point of operation in a way that they could get hurt, right? And so how do we meet that, knowing that we've got all these different variables and key switches and programs and I can't shut the computer down? But if I don't, that's the only way that I can shut down the equipment is by shutting down. You know the entire computer and so it's really just navigating some of those nuances and making sure that whoever's helping you write some of that out and do the training with the employees on that equipment is really well versed with that.
Speaker 2:So what we recommend to people is, if you have like a glue pot, put it on a different line so it doesn't cool down, don't have to heat up, stays hot. We'll say if you have a guard, look at putting two guards in place. The one guard If the guard's for the whole machine and you're trying to set up, put in two guards. It gets rid of the problem that way. Look at the timing. Maybe it's a timing issue, Maybe you don't really need certain things powered up. You need it during this time, but you don't have to be worried that you're at during that time.
Speaker 1:Evaluate when we're having the employees interact with that piece of equipment. What are the absolutes that we have to have? And how can we protect them from whatever the hazard is so like? I said a lot of times, what we'll see initially is just like a big fenced in area.
Speaker 2:You bet.
Speaker 1:Right and but once I open that up, there is no more guards.
Speaker 2:That's it so. So this can't be a limit switch.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:And you got to watch the key device and then you got to watch the override, because, yeah, we spend a lot of time. Manufacturers, there's computer systems where you lock out.
Speaker 1:There's always an override. There has to be.
Speaker 2:And there may be an override trouble she's got. So you got to pay attention to what is that system and what is that technology. Yeah, so because some of the technologies are becoming faster and people get trained on it.
Speaker 1:I mean it's coming fast now. So if you're looking at installing that or you're having some work done on it, you may want to just ask, because the techs are going to know that. Did the install? They're going to know what the overrides are and you want to make sure as a management team you got to do your procedures, you know what it is and you know how to manage around that, whether that's something you want to allow your employees to do or not.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. That's some of the things you're looking at. And then back to this, the guarding. The guarding is interesting because guarding for the machines is interpreted differently at different places. Consider guarding Some guarding as a fence in a room, some guardians a fence around the robot, and some guarding as right up next to the robot, where they'll say well, we have light bar systems. I don't disagree, but if you have light curtains or light bars, do you have more than one, two or three or four? I mean, how do you make that decision as a guarding issue for that robot? Then when I walk up there, I'm not relying everything on one light bar. That makes me nervous if something goes wrong with it.
Speaker 1:Here's my hitch with that, just as a safety person is. Typically these are in food manufacturing facilities, right? The number one thing that we do in food plants is we shoot water everywhere. We do some things.
Speaker 2:Something's dry Water on it.
Speaker 1:Every night we're soaking everything down.
Speaker 2:And chemicals.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and chemicals that are corrosive. So it becomes really difficult to make the argument that a limit switch is going to be fine as the only line of defense, when we know that we do that which causes failures.
Speaker 2:And just so, we clean a lot of stuff. All the plants do right. We spend a lot of time with sanitation. We do as a company and we've seen failures with the limit switches.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've seen failures with the computers where we bagged them still and they still don't work Because part of it is it doesn't have to take a direct hit with the moisture, it just the moisture in the room. The moisture in the room and the humidity in the room while it's going on. It can go through everything.
Speaker 2:So that's what you're looking at, so you can't rely on a single light curtain. Now, maybe, if it's a dry environment and never gets wet, maybe you can, but that same technology you've got to evaluate what's your risk. Yes, how many light curtains do you need? I like to have two or three, so if you fail, you've got buffers, basically.
Speaker 1:And part of it too, is you're going to have to evaluate within your region for OSHA if that's going to be acceptable or not. Sure how they interpret things and how they feel about that. Is that going to be okay or are they going to say Nope, it's actually got to be an actual physical lock and disconnection and totally disconnect and eliminate that source.
Speaker 2:Now, nothing about the robots is if they do go down, because they do.
Speaker 1:They do.
Speaker 2:How long is it going to take to get them up?
Speaker 1:and running.
Speaker 2:Yup and who. The second part is. The first part is how do we manage the robot when it's down, who do we contact, how long, all that kind of stuff. But the second part is in the next 15 minutes. You're still trying to run. So, what are you going to do now? Because that person was trained to manage the robot.
Speaker 1:They weren't really trained to do the job, so you got to keep moving if it's like, okay, well, this is, this is down and it's going to be down until we can get some text in here Until next Saturday.
Speaker 2:So, you're still running, probably so that. So your training has to look out from a safety side. Make sure you're covered. Maybe you got to do job rotations now because it would have been an ergo reduction for the robot like in the last episode, but now it's not. So now I can't be doing boxes for eight hours myself.
Speaker 1:Well, that's right. We had work hardening programs from the ergonomic side, where you do job rotations and you do it for a certain amount of minutes and then you'd rotate out.
Speaker 2:You've got to look at that now. Yeah, we got to be part of the system.
Speaker 1:We eliminated that and that's not on our radar anymore. We got to look at bringing some of those things back, and so that's something that you'd want to make sure that you're including somewhere in an SOP or some kind of program or procedure somewhere to capture that. That's going to be necessary because it may be something that you've been able to eliminate that program completely from your facility if you have enough.
Speaker 2:But you had the robots.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they have some programs. They want to vaccinate patients. We're back in it.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And then the final thing I want to talk about the robots is they can do some amazing things, but they're only as good as the people that manage them. So you've got to train your people to a little bit more. You got to train them on how to run the robot, train them on how to understand when it's starting to be a little off so you can get ahead of it.
Speaker 2:Let's get ahead of it and get people coming Training on lockout, which is going to be different. If you need to lock it out, train on. Is there maybe a different system? Maybe your lockout was I have a lock, I have a key Lockout piece of equipment Great. But if it's one of those style with the big silver keys now and you have to take that into another door, well, now someone else controlling that when I'm supposed to go in there and do something, because that's kind of a weird thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like this weird joint verification thing happening.
Speaker 2:Right. You got to look at the systems and polish procedures you were doing and say how are we going to meet the need to meet the intent and keep the risk down doing those systems? So it could be inspecting it, it could just be going inspected.
Speaker 1:It could be PMs inspections, whatever that looks like.
Speaker 2:Now you got to look at how many people can I really have in there and what are the safeguards. Maybe every gate's got to be open or every door's open, but you just got to. I just want you to when you the robots have some great things, but we want you to know from the worker safety side just don't treat it like it's just a robot.
Speaker 1:They can create some unique hazards, as well. And so I think, from my side, as a safety person, one of the biggest things that I would want to communicate is with your safety person. Try your best when they're doing the training and the tax, or training your employees.
Speaker 2:To be there.
Speaker 1:So that you're able to see and hear. Here's exactly how it works and here's you know. I can think ahead and be like, oh, that's going to be a hazard because you're looking at it through a different lens, as a safety person, than the people who are trying to learn. Here's how I do the PM.
Speaker 2:They're focused on that, that the techs are going to train you, which they usually do when they set it up. Get all the data you can from it. That's when you ask all these questions. Don't let them tell your robot train you for 30 minutes and say good luck and you got 15. Write all your questions out. And they were there. Write your procedures. They're there. They're there.
Speaker 1:Start writing it out. Yep Well, and that'll help you meet your PSSRs. If you're doing, you know, some kind of non-regulated MOC process with a pre-startup safety review, it'll help you complete and finish that process out too.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Good things about robots. They're amazing. The only weird thing about the robots is they have to work with a human sometime.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so now you got to train that human on all the variables, not just to run the robot.
Speaker 1:Yep, it's just different and unique hazards, and so it's just reframing how you look at it and how you think about that and just trying to capture it because it's new, it's new technology to a lot of us, and it's not just new, as in like yesterday.
Speaker 2:It's like growing faster technology-wise than people can really like imagine it's happening. So we just got to.
Speaker 1:And that's what I'm saying. The AI side has done some incredible things, but there's, you know, some different risks that we're not expecting, that are coming out of that, too, that we're finding out too.
Speaker 2:Absolutely All right. So that's our episode for today.
Speaker 1:All right, If you want to have some more information on all of this deep dives, our sponsor AllenSafetyCoachingcom, since we don't have a sponsor.
Speaker 2:That's it.
Speaker 1:That's. Our sponsor is AllenSafetyCoachingcom, so we do deep dives where we really break down the implementation of all of this stuff step by step, really slowly, across whole bench lessons. So check that out and I will see you next time.
Speaker 2:Thank you, everybody.
Speaker 1:Take care everybody. Bye. Thank you for listening to Safe, Efficient, Profitable a Worker Safety Podcast. If you're looking for more in-depth discussions or step-by-step solutions on all of the different safety and regulatory topics, please visit us at wwwallonsafetycoachingcom for web-based virtual coaching and training, or at wwwallondashsafetycom to book our team for onsite services, training sessions, to order merchandise, to learn more about our team and what services we provide in the field, or just simply to request a topic for us to cover on our next podcast. If you found today's podcast helpful and would like to support our podcast further, please help us by subscribing, liking and sharing this podcast with anyone that could benefit from the information we cover here, as that helps us to continue to put out this free content. Thank you so much for your support, HoloLand, and we look forward to your politics. You.
