Over the past decade, the jobs in metal manufacturing have migrated from moving and processing physical objects to the skills needed in today’s integrated manufacturing systems, in which computers control an entire production process.
Robots are the blue-collar workers in today’s smart manufacturing plants, performing the cutting, bending, welding and assembling of metal components. The trend toward robotics and automation has been driven in part by the protracted labor shortage. The challenge is the need for safety programs to keep pace with the change.
As manufacturers retrain employees to understand the operations of different robotic applications and what to do if they break down, the changes in the work they perform create new health and safety risks, with bottom-line implications for CFOs.
We’ve identified three of these emergent risks:
1. New workplace hazards
Many metal manufacturing plants have moved to cellular processes, in which a group of different machines in the same location on the production floor makes a finished product. The product then moves to another cell. Employees generally are cross-trained to operate the different machines in each cell since a single machine breakdown can disrupt the entire process.
The complex layout of the different machinery compounds the injury hazards. Fortunately, other automated systems reduce this risk. Presence sensing devices like light curtains and safety pressure mats provide machine guarding. Light curtains send pulses of infrared light that are interrupted when people come too close to the equipment. When the hazard is detected, a stop signal discontinues operations. A safety pressure mat suspends operation when a minimum weight is detected.
2. Inventory movements
Moving heavy materials in plants has evolved from manual hand trucks and forklifts to electric-powered tuggers and sit-down/stand-up fork trucks. An electric tugger can be safer than forklifts, but it still poses the threat of injury from collisions with unwary workers and smashes of hands when linking or unlinking carts. Since tuggers often move at faster speeds than manual forklifts, the risk of severe damage rises.
Fork trucks that move heavier loads like pallets introduce under-ride hazards, in which the operator backs up further than intended into a horizontal rack beam, resulting in potentially severe injuries. Risk mitigation considerations include the installation of rear guards on equipment and barriers on plant floors to alert operators of a horizontal intrusion hazard.
3. Water and fire exposures
Cellular manufacturing creates atypical fire risks. A fire can destroy multiple types of expensive equipment simultaneously, requiring diverse spares on hand to maintain production. The use of flammable plastic storage crates to move materials to each cell increases the probable maximum financial losses caused by fire.
While automatic sprinklers reduce the risk of personal injury, water can destroy expensive automated equipment. The use of non-flammable crates and waterless fire suppression systems that rely on gas suppressants to smother a fire when minimizing fire hazard losses.
Given the wide-scale migration to cellular manufacturing processes, it is prudent to seek guidance from the providers of new equipment regarding safety best practices. Specialized insurance companies knowledgeable about current safety standards, quality control processes and business continuity planning are another important resource, given their technical risk management expertise.
Brandon Hartley is Lead Underwriter, Middle Market P&C at QBE North America.
AJ Steiner is Lead Loss Control Consultant, Claims & Risk Solutions at QBE North America.
