Wednesday, October 10, 2018

What Industries Use Electrical Maintenance Safety Devices [EMSDs]?

Your plant management team has held several employee meetings in preparation for replacing the current calendar-based inspection program with a condition-based program.  During these meetings, Electrical Maintenance Safety Devices were introduced and will be used by the asset inspectors.  A few co-workers asked what industries have already adopted EMSDs.  Since your management team strongly supports peer-to-peer training, you volunteered to research the answer to this question for the next meeting.    What industries use EMSDs?  More importantly, why do they use them?  Let’s find out! 

The adoption of electrical maintenance safety devices in industrial applications increases annually.  Industries acquire EMSDs by purchasing new equipment or by retrofitting their existing equipment.  What factors are driving this adoption?  It’s all about worker safety and risk reduction.   

Organizations focused on safety and risk reduction continuously revise their standards and regulations as technology becomes available.  Using electrical safety as an example, new standards and regulations from OSHA, NFPA, CSA, IEEE, ANSI and NETA drive companies to evaluate their existing procedures to determine if they are compliant with the latest regulations.  As equipment becomes more complex and standards become stricter, most companies must make changes and many times, those changes involve upgrading existing equipment or purchasing new. 

Electrical Maintenance Safety Devices enable companies to save money by increasing the efficiency and safety of work processes. Their use decreases or eliminates unproductive man-hour labor by reducing or eliminating the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) and high-risk tasks such as removing electrical panel covers. The new inspection process using EMSDs will streamline the work, eliminate up to 95% of the unproductive man-hour labor costs, increase personnel safety and improve the quality of the inspections.

Improvements Realized by Adopting EMSDs 

Clients using or needing EMSDs come from a variety of industries.  Basically, any industry that relies on the constant flow of electricity as critical to operations would benefit from using EMSDs.  Let’s list a few of these industries: 

• • Electrical Component Manufacturers 
  • Electrical Supply Houses 
  • Service Companies such as Call Centers 
  • Beverage Producers 
  • Chemical Plants 

• Refineries 
• Offshore Platforms 
• Shipbuilders & Ship Owners 
• Ports 
• Airports 

• Data Centers 
• Power Generation Plants 
• Consumer Electronics 
• Food Processing 
• Large buildings/Office Complexes 

• Hospitals 
• Hotels 
• Mining 
• Metal Processing Plants 
• Municipal Water & Waste Water Plants 

• Paper Mills 
• Pharmaceutical Plants 
• Printing Plants 
• Telecommunications 
• Electric Railroads 

As you can see, this is an extensive list of industries and there are probably some missing too.  Imagine the loss of revenue if power at an airport or offshore platform goes out.  Imagine the customer inconvenience if a power generation plant or telecommunication company goes offline due to an electrical failure.   

Conclusion:   

Adopting EMSDs as part of electrical maintenance inspections offers many values to multiple types of industries.  Improved operational reliability and productivity can be accomplished by implementing electrical maintenance safety devices [EMSDs] to monitor, maintain and anticipate problems with their electrical systems.  These industries, after adopting EMSDs, recognize safer working environments, compliance to standards and regulations and overall improvements to reliability which in turn minimizes downtime and the potential loss of revenue.  You are now equipped with information to present at your next team meeting! 

Want to learn more?  Please register for our weekly blog program.