June 22, 2018

Overview

A very large, multi-facility beverage manufacturer/bottler selected Grantek to manage and implement safety upgrades for high-risk assets across all North American facilities. This is an ongoing 10-year project across the entire organization to eliminate inherent hazards to their workforce.

Challenges

• The customer wished to make safety improvements to all North American facilities. This required an inventory of the equipment in place at each facility and an analysis and prioritization of the safety risk mitigations needed. The variety of sites and equipment made this challenging.
• To make the most of the millions of dollars the customer is investing in safety improvements, they required a partner capable of efficiently managing the project, as well as integrating the safety improvements into the production lines at each facility.
• The customer required production and operational performance to remain unaffected by implementation of the safety improvements.
• The project is a minimum 10-year effort.

Solutions

Grantek created a Machine Safety Screening Survey Tool to identify high-risk assets present at each site, enabling the customer to do the initial evaluation themselves. The survey evaluation tool is Grantek’s intellectual property hosted at a secure data center that allows customers to securely log in and record required information at any time. This tool is in the form of an industry-standard safety questionnaire covering electrical, mechanical, operations and equipment access.

Each facility has been or will be evaluated using this tool. The inventory collected by the tool is then used by Grantek to plan the most efficient means of assessing, procuring and installing the needed safety mitigations, and upgrades, including equipment guarding and emergency stop sensors and systems.

Partnering with Grantek on this project has helped the bottler manage costs and maximize return on their safety investment. After year 7 of this 10-year project, Grantek has demonstrated cost savings on this project by implementing safety mitigations and systems that are common to multiple sites.