Worker Safety in Industry 4.0
Today, safety professionals face a host of challenges. Generational turnover, regulatory changes, budget constraints, and other factors create distractions, interruptions, and frustration. On top of it all, these same professionals are under significant pressure from their organizations to achieve even more aggressive safety goals.
Opportunity for improvement
Over the past several years, progress has been made globally related to industrial safety and fatality rates. Unfortunately, according to the International Labour Organization, each year approximately 2.78 million workers die as a result of occupational accidents and work-related diseases.1
Clearly, there is room for improvement. To close this safety gap, safety professionals can rely on new technologies to help deliver better safety outcomes.
How Industry 4.0 helps close the gap
We are currently in the fourth industrial revolution, often branded “Industry 4.0,” which is driving changes across industrial organizations.
This transformation is happening thanks to the collection and transfer of information from any variety of sensors to dedicated cloud environments on the internet.
Cloud storage (saving the data to the Internet instead of on a local computer hard drive or server) is more cost efficient and flexible. It also makes it easier to create a better user experience while providing the protection and privacy required.
Within this cloud-hosted environment, the collected data can be compared in ways never before possible and then displayed in a friendly format so that managers can take action where it’s needed -- improving operations, training, safety, and more.
For that reason, Industry 4.0 offers an exciting opportunity to drive safety awareness and accountability. As a result, safety solutions that consolidate historical and real-time data from protective equipment are gaining attention in corporations around the world.
Within the personal protective equipment space, gas detection is a great place to start
Gas detection is a sensible first step in your Industry 4.0 journey.
Here is why:
- Relevance: An effective, high-performance gas detection system plays a critical role in your safety program by helping to safeguard lives and industrial facilities. Improvements in gas detection have huge impacts on safety outcomes.
- Accurate readings: When properly maintained, gas detectors have fast-responding, accurate sensors that provide reliable, high-quality data that can be analyzed and consolidated into meaningful insights.
- Seamless connectivity: Modern gas detectors and area monitors connect and communicate with others in their network, even within large working perimeters, to share information locally and remotely so that alerts related to exposures, compliance concerns and more can be quickly identified and addressed.
- Automatic transfer of readings to the cloud: The data can be automatically transferred from your gas detector to the cloud, making data available quickly for immediate review and easy to access for historical reasons as well.
- Centralized data: When safety professionals can review gas detection data across their fleet or even multiple locations, it gives them the opportunity to be proactive and to share the burden with colleagues or trusted partners in their safety journey.
Your Industry 4.0-enabled safety journey
We understand that it can be intimidating to start your safety journey within the context of Industry 4.0, and we are here to help.
Every day, our customers experience the benefits of an Industry 4.0-enabled safety program when they see how MSA + Safety io solutions help them regain control of their gas detection fleet, uncover safety training opportunities, drive individual accountability, and eliminate interruptions that would otherwise distract them from achieving their safety goals.
Take your first Industry 4.0 steps with MSA and Safety io to see how you can improve your safety outcomes, too. Request your live demo with Safety io today.
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