Considering where to put impact protection products is a commercial necessity. Thinking ahead avoids accidents, but also ringfences productivity and your reputation as a safe workplace. Where is impact management an issue for you?
Health & Safety obligations both inside and around your premises are extensive. Though accidents in your warehouse, factory site or another industrial area could cost you more than just non-compliance fines!
Safeguarding your reputation – and therefore your business future – hinges on taking the right steps to protect your staff and workplace visitors from moving machinery and vehicles. Sensible impact management installations help with this, though you can also buy specific pedestrian safety items such as guard rails and barriers.
Impact protection is more about keeping structures, vehicles and machinery safe too.
Why do a thorough risk assessment?
Regular risk assessments to plan impact protection helps to manage your costs, time and productivity.
Taking steps to shield structures and defend vehicles can seem unnecessary if you offer comprehensive training and guidance for drivers and machinery operators. However, anyone can have a momentary lapse in concentration or misjudge distances!
How do workplace impact management systems save you money? Top-quality products absorb the force of collisions. Then, you simply replace the bollard, pillar protector, safety end, landing plates or other low-priced safety management product.
Compare that to the cost of repairing a major structure in your workplace, dealing with a damaged forklift truck, or coping with an irate customer who severely damaged their car on a visit!
Preventative measures in workplaces
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) website includes resources to help with thorough risk assessments, to prevent and manage a diverse range of potential problems. https://www.hse.gov.uk/risk/
It’s also invaluable to engage with a reliable company, supplying British made facility and traffic management products at keen prices. Safety Industrial offers expert, realistic advice to companies on the best ways to use impact protection methods.
Every commercial site has its own layout and operational patterns and stress points. Keep in mind that this can be a fluid situation. As your business adapts and changes, the likely places for both minor and major collisions can alter. Which is why you need regular surveys of your internal and external business environment.
The situation is far more serious in warehouses, manufacturing storerooms and major car parking facilities. Basically, anywhere that heavy-duty manned, and unmanned vehicles and equipment operate. Those are the places where you can’t be too careful, and widespread use of impact protection products must be considered.
Your pre-installation assessment needs to start from where vehicles enter your workplace, so corners and posts they could hit for example. Then, survey all the poles, barriers, doorways or protruding structures internally, to decide which would benefit from protectors to manage minor scuffs, dents and dinks.
Protection goes two ways
Keep in mind that your assessment of your impact protection goes two ways.
For instance, you could look at a strong, substantial column or wall, and assume that it can withstand a considerable collision. However, could the vehicles or equipment operating nearby be better protected?
Installing impact protection systems is as much about preventing damage to costly company assets (or visitor cars). Or, at least taking steps to absorb the force of an impact, to minimise the damage to an expensive item.
Best industrial safety products for protection
Decisions about what products to buy – and where to place impact absorption and avoidance items – needs to take into account the creative solutions now available.
The range of options is extensive – from HGV landing plates, and rows of robust bollards, to bollard covers and easy fit column wraps. Bright coloured ends and edgings are a simple, but effective way to highlight and protect protruding planes.
Quality matters though. You don’t want to be forced to replace them often, find that they prove inadequate or discover they are cumbersome and intrusive.
Safe Industrial offers versatile and innovation impact protection items made from quality materials, moulded in the UK. The range includes low cost, hi-vis products that slot easily around posts, rails and other common workplace structures.
All designed and constructed to provide maximum benefit, with minimum dimensions. For example, our protective wrap materials for columns and our forklift truck skirts work brilliantly, but take up little space.
Specifying the right product for impact management
Getting the best products to ‘cushion’ protruding structures and vulnerable areas of your workplace – internally and externally – doesn’t have to be a complicated process.
Simply contact Safe Industrial and we would be pleased to talk you through our range, its benefits and the best ways to apply cost-effective impact protection methods.