Defeating of safeguards: a vicious circle
Both the manufacturer and the user have a responsibility to ensure that machines can be operated safely and without safeguards being defeated. At each stage of the life cycle, from planning to decommissioning, communication with all parties involved and a preventive approach to incentives for defeating are conducive to preventing safeguards from being defeated during operation, and sustainably.
Procurement
Communication between all parties involved is essential for a machine to be produced that is safe and easy to operate in any situation. Only then can users be certain of obtaining a machine tailored to their needs.
Design
The manufacturer’s scope for influencing the likelihood of users defeating safeguards at a later stage begins at the machine’s design stage. A safety concept that takes the machine’s usability into account not only increases safety, but also reduces costs.
Construction
During selection of measures to prevent safeguards being defeated, incentives for defeating should first be eliminated by constructive measures. Measures must then be taken to impede defeating, and to detect it should it occur.
Documentation
To ensure that the machine can be used as intended, the operating instructions must specify a safe procedure for performing each task.
Sale
During the sales process, good advice and clarifying the future machine user’s requirements as precisely as possible effectively help to ensure that safeguards on machines are not defeated during later operation.
Placing on the market
At the point of placing on the market, responsibility is transferred from the manufacturer of the machine to the user.
Transfer and commissioning
Before a machine is put into operation for the first time at its place of use, the user must ensure that all tasks can be carried out safely and without incentives for safeguards to be defeated. The most important means of determining this is the user’s job safety analysis.
Operating procedure
The operating procedure not only explains the residual risks, but also how the machine can be operated safely, and without the defeating of safeguards. This enables unauthorized operating procedures resulting from ignorance to be prevented.
Instruction
Provision of regular instruction is the key to sustainably safe machine operation. It informs operating personnel and raises their awareness of hazards presented by the machine and the possible consequences of defeating safeguards.
Operation and organization
Sustainably safe operation of machinery cannot be achieved through discrete measures; it requires a safety culture to be adopted and rigorously applied within the company. A constructive error culture helps to prevent unsafe operating states and the defeating of safeguards, reliably and sustainably.
