Play it Safe

Cement plants are not a playground and can be hazardous environments, primarily due to a lack of knowledge, information and awareness among the people working permanently or temporarily (like truck drivers or visitors) at the plant. This is both a risk for the health of the people at the plant, but also for smooth and efficient processes. For these reasons, it is important that the companies operating the plant take every possible measure to avoid accidents and process failures caused by human error.

How has this been handled in the past? Traditionally, security guidelines were written and printed all over the plant. Visitors or truck drivers were required to pass a ‘test’ (often guided by employees) and print out and carry a certificate during their stay at the plant. The next steps involved signing in at plant entrance terminals – an improvement, but still lacking in customisation, integration with yard management tools, and consistency. Then there were terminals at the plant entrance (in the office) with online signature. A big step forward, but again, still far from being easily customisable, integrable with yard management tools and consistent. Nowadays, smartphones and cloud connectivity offer much better solutions to meet these demands. This article will describe these demands and present methods for how ‘play it safe’ practices at cement plants can and should be implemented in the 2020s.

The demands

The demands for a safety and training app can be summarised with a few keywords: easy, accessible, flexible, integrated and consistent. Let’s have a deeper look to get a better understanding of these challenges.

Easy accessibility

A safety training application should be accessible from everywhere using a tablet, smartphone, computer, or a terminal directly at the plant, depending on the role of the user. A truck driver should be able to complete the safety training, ideally even before he enters the plant. A visitor could use the same method or use his desktop PC or, especially for short term visits, use a terminal at the plant entrance. A common factor in all scenarios is the need to avoid printouts.

Customisation

Different roles need different (safety) training. A good safety training application should therefore be highly customisable. The plant logistics or IT department should be able to easily set up individual training, e.g. for truck drivers, visitors, weighers, etc. The safety instructions should be straightforward to create using familiar tools like PowerPoint or Photoshop, and should be easy to integrate into the safety training application. Design adaptions and multilingual support are crucial as well. These tools have to be self-explanatory, so that an IT expert is not needed to configure the app. The guideline is that anyone who is able to work with the ‘normal’ office tools should be able to do this configuration by themselves after initial training.

Integration

Embedding a safety training application into the logistics workflow at the plant, i.e. the Axians VAS Yard Management, makes it much more valuable than a stand-alone app. Imagine a new truck driver entering the plant who has not yet passed the driver safety training. At the check-in terminal this will be directly identified and he will not be allowed to enter the plant until he has passed this training. This should avoid untrained people accessing the plant. But when the driver has successfully passed the safety training, this info should be automatically transferred from the app to a yard management solution, so that this can be easily identified during check-in at the plant.

Consistency

A Safety Training Application has to ensure consistent training to increase overall yard safety. The certificate issued after the training should expire after a customisable period of time, thereby guaranteeing every user refreshes their knowledge about plant safety on a frequent basis.

The training app could remind users in advance before their certificate expires, thereby preventing issues that arise when a certificate is no longer valid at the time of entering a plant.

The solution: Safety Training 4.0

The concept of future-safe training app faces some challenges and, due to its critical integration with plant logistic solutions, should be driven by yard management experts. An example of such a training app is the VAS Safety Training Application from Axians IAS, which enables the creation and administration of individual safety training.

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Read the article online at: https://www.worldcement.com/special-reports/29112024/play-it-safe/