How to ensure worker safety with a CMMS

Digitizing and automating tasks can be beneficial for safety professionals, writes Addisson Shaw. (auremar/Adobe Stock)

A computerized management maintenance system (CMMS) can go a long way towards ensuring worker safety.

By digitizing and automating many of the tedious tasks of registered safety professionals, a well-designed CMMS can free up time and headspace.

In turn, you can direct these resources to creative problem solving and developing new ways to increase workplace safety.

A CMMS is computer software created specifically to simplify maintenance management. Maintenance management — maintaining company resources to maximize efficiency and minimize wastage — is essential to overall profits.

It allows organizations to keep up to date and in full compliance with all regulations, and makes it easier to protect the safety of everyone in your workforce.

Once policies are designed, maintenance-management systems are put in place to enforce and document them. Using a CMMS not only streamlines this process, but makes it cost-effective, too.

The software can be customized to suit an organization’s specific needs, but there are also several general-worker safety benefits for all companies using a high-quality CMMS.

The most important ways that a CMMS can ensure worker safety are outlined below:

Safety drill reminders

Periodic safety drills and practice sessions for emergency safety measures are vital for every office or factory.

By using a CMMS, scheduling, performing and documenting them is simpler and easier than ever before.

You can build drills and practices into a company’s overall schedule and document the process in real-time so that the records are always accessible.

Effective documentation

Incident documentation is another critical aspect of worker safety.

As well as maintaining all records for legal purposes, this allow executives to review the situation and make changes to prevent unfortunate or harmful incidents from happening again.

A CMMS allows administrators and managers to file and search through incidents according to employee, location, type, cause and other variables.

The data is easy to see and contextualize, making it readily available for any legal requirements and useful for improving day-to-day operations and safety.

Communicate updates

A modern CMMS can easily integrate files of various types, from different departments.

Safety records and asset management, for instance, are easily collated.

If new guidelines are created within a company, or new regulations are enforced on a government level, anyone going to work on a specific asset will be able to view the latest information simply by checking the management file.

There’s no need to try and make sure that the details have been distributed throughout an organization. This spares safety professionals a lot of time and effort.

Perform holistic audits

Documentation, policies, best practices and incident reports are all kept together on a single CMMS hub, which makes it simpler to analyze the data in a single, holistic audit.

This gives a clear idea of company performance and assets and allows managers and directors to focus more or less on specific areas as required.

For instance, all alleged employee injuries could be checked against incident reports and official safety policies. From there, executives could make informed decisions on the best course of action to deal with each situation and prevent them from recurring.

By using automated CMMS procedures, human errors are more easily identified and dealt with.

Ultimately, a well-implemented software-based management system can drive profits, productivity and protection of employees.

Addisson Shaw is a content editor at Resourceful Compliance in Malvern, Pa.