Safety should be a number one priority for all manufacturing facilities. Not only from an ethical prospective (keeping your employees safe), but also from a fiduciary perspective.  

We are continuously seeing heavy fines being sanctioned on companies who are not in compliance with OSHA regulations. Last month we learned that Bruce Foods Corporation – a Mexican food manufacturer based in El Paso, Texas – was cited by OSHA after an employee suffered an amputation. The company now faces $194,350 in fines.

OSHA cited the company for 24 serious safety violations including failing to train employees in lockout/tagout procedures, inadequate machine guarding, lack of fall protection, and exposing employees to live electrical parts - all things that could have been easily avoided. 

Learn More about OSHA

Over the past decade safety has become a high priority on the plant floor, and this is great to hear. Why? It means that employers want you to go home at night healthy and safe. These days it seems like you can’t move without tripping a safety circuit on a machine and this has been changing the way we think about safety. With the advent of safety over Ethernet, we can monitor the safety system, make decisions, and notify people of problems faster than ever before. There is even an effort to include Collaborative Safety (where a person and a machine meet) as a focus moving forward to increase up-time.

Read the Blog Post by Tom Roth, Motion & Drives Product Specialist