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A Holistic Approach to Safety Provides Sustainable Returns
Innovative new technologies and emerging global standards are enabling the integration of safety and automation for bottom -line benefits.
In the midst of the current economic crisis, those responsible for manufacturing strategies—and in particular, safety strategies within the manufacturing process—may do well to reflect on the Chinese script for the word “crisis”: two characters—one representing danger, the other opportunity.
Historically, safety has been seen with a rather myopic focus on the former character. Understood as a means to prevent dangerous incidents, safety applications often relied only on operators' and maintenance personnel's alertness to hazards. Others were deployed as an afterthought, in response to an accident or external (i.e., industry or governmental) standards. The result was a reactive approach, separate from the manufacturing automation system, and exacerbated by the limitations of safety technology. These technologies often required machines to come to a full stop for safe states when repair, maintenance, or operator access was needed. Since this downtime reduced productivity, personnel often bypassed safety systems increasing risk on multiple levels.
According to Dan Hornbeck, global safety market development manager at Rockwell Automation, new technologies and standards provide manufacturers the opportunity to move beyond this shortsighted view to realize the opportunity inherent in the safety dynamic...
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A Closer Look at the Development of Safety Automation 
Standards, technologies, and risk management have changed the playing field, with safety and automation systems able to coexist on common platforms.
Functional safety standards have improved the way contemporary safety systems are designed.
Historically, safety standards used principles based on redundancy, diversity, and diagnostics to create levels of safety system structures to help ensure the safety functions performed within a manufacturing environment; but no time factor was integrated into these standards.
A new approach to global standards adds a time element, known as (the probability of dangerous failure and the mean time to dangerous failure.) This adds confidence to system performance. ISO13849-1:2006 builds on the categories of safety structure; and IEC62061 builds on the foundation of the structure, also known as (hardware fault tolerance.) New diagnostics also offer a designer greater flexibility in achieving safety requirements. In combination these yield a time-sensitive level of integrity...
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