Leveraging Technology to Boost Industrial Safety

By nature, industrial facilities bring with them a measure of safety concerns that most office-dwellers don’t have to concern themselves with: high-powered heavy machinery, moving parts and unpredicted breakdowns, just to name a few.  It’s why hard hats and jumpsuits are preferred over business casual in most manufacturing environments.

With today’s wireless and Industrial Internet of Things technologies, however, Emerson is working to bring manufacturing safety to new levels. And it all starts with a simple truth: The more you know about the equipment in a plant and how it is performing, the safer employees will be when they’re working in and around it.

 Through a robust portfolio of safety and security products, Emerson helps plants reduce risk, avoid incidents and operate with certainty. From integrated safety systems to fire and gas leak detection, we help customers prepare for the unpredictable—giving them peace of mind and keeping workers safe.

Safe, secure operations begin with eliminating surprises. Emerson sensor networks deliver predictive data insights that allow manufacturers to build strategic reliability plans to help ensure that plants are running at full capacity with minimal risk. Studies show that the majority of workplace accidents occur in situations of “unplanned downtime” – in other words, when something breaks. These situations can often be chaotic as workers scramble to diagnose and make repairs under the extreme pressure of getting the plant back up and running. 

Informed by these predictive insights and actionable data, maintenance practices can shift to a more proactive mode, where workers track the health of equipment and act to prevent breakdowns, rather than responding to them as they occur. These practices can make a huge difference in both safety and efficiency, with the highest-level, Top Quartile performers seeing 97 percent facility availability on average, and most downtime being planned time for upgrades and repairs. On the other hand, bottom-quartile performers see 86 percent availability on average, with most of the downtime being unplanned. That’s a huge swing of 11 percent of total operational time during which employees are either subjected to more risky emergency situations … or not. 

Additionally, with Emerson wireless sensors and monitoring devices keeping an eye on key equipment, performance data can be compiled, shared and analyzed at a distance. This reduces the need for manual inspections of equipment, which means less time for employees to spend in the higher-risk operational areas of a facility.

We see these solutions combining to create the best ideal conditions for both employees and the businesses they work for: safe, reliable, predictable operations.