How Conveyor Safety Increases Production and Returns

Todd Swinderman, President Emeritus, Martin Engineering

Daniel Marshall, Product Engineer, Martin Engineering

Engineers have spent decades attempting to design, install and maintain belt conveyor components that eliminate fugitive materials to improve the working environment, reduce accidents and increase productivity.  Why?  It is estimated that 85 percent of belt conveyor maintenance and production problems are related to fugitive materials — dust, spillage and carryback.^[1]  Accordingly, a similar percentage of conveyor safety issues arise from these same fugitive materials.

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Improving the safe access and maintenance to conveyors increases efficiency significantly.

The number of workplace injuries has taken a steep decline over the last century, but we have reached a point of diminishing returns.  To achieve the next level of improvement in reducing conveyor accidents, the approach to these complex systems must change, including the way conveyors are specified, designed, purchased, operated and maintained.

Root Causes

It has been observed that there are five root causes of workplace injuries and fatalities which lead directly to an increased release of fugitive materials.  These fugitive materials result in scenarios that encourage workers to potentially react unsafely.  These five root causes are:

– A ‘Production First’ Culture

– ‘Low Bid’ Purchasing

– Needlessly Complex Designs

– Over-Regulation

– Understaffed or Undertrained Personnel

Production-First Culture

When the focus is on production at the cost of all else, it’s no wonder that workers take risks to keep conveyors running.  Corporate slogans touting workplace safety and environmentalism become a smoke screen for what the workers really see: production comes before safety.  Obviously, the reason a company operates is production.  So, to counter the hypocrisy, corporations would be better off admitting up front that production is the focus.  A better and more realistic goal would be ‘Production Done Safely.’

Low-Bid Purchasing

A poor management culture starts in the boardroom, where decisions on capital expenditures are typically based on feasibility studies that only consider direct costs as identified by conventional accounting practices.  Historically, purchasing decisions are almost universally based on a ‘low bid’ process.  The details are left to be resolved as operating costs (and often maintenance expenses) and are not thoroughly considered in the engineering or construction phases.

In the long run, the cost of ‘buying cheap’ can get very expensive.  A low-bid system often fails to deliver the required production capacity, while also posing greater hazards to workers.  In fact, low-bid designs often turn out to be the costliest, because they can generate significant expenses for subsequent modifications as a result of issues discovered during trials and start-up.  Instead, the focus should be on lowest cost over the life of the system.  [Fig. 1]

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Figure 1

Needlessly Complex Designs

Complexity does not necessarily improve safety.  Simple designs are often harder to realize, but the extra design time required to simplify the operation and maintenance of conveyor components that directly affect production and cleanliness has an enormous payoff.  Unfortunately, the same benefits are almost impossible to incorporate in low bid designs, due to the intersection of the customer perception that those benefits ‘cost too much’ and the supplier’s need to ‘win the bid.’

Over-Regulation

Industry groups and associations, standards-writing organizations, countries, states and cities have issued thousands of pages of performance-based safety regulations.  In many cases, rules within a country contradict each other or are not applicable to the industry in which they are enforced.  The effort required for suppliers to comply with the myriad of rules is immense, and these efforts are often negated by the varying opinions of a multitude of inspectors.  Conforming to the complicated assortment of regulations and passing opinion-based inspections becomes problematic at best.  But it seems clear that countries with specification-based standards have lower fatality rates.^[2]  [Fig. 2]

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Figure 2

Understaffed or Undertrained Personnel

The lack of adequate funding for maintenance is epidemic in the bulk materials handling industry.  Millions are spent on components, yet these investments are often made without the added maintenance budget needed to keep the components in a sound and safe operating condition.  Generally, the size of a maintenance crew is based on Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) for major pieces of equipment, based on the illogical conclusion that workers can maintain all the minor components of the system in their ‘spare’ time. [Fig. 3]

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Figure 3

Production Done Safely

Regrettably, most equipment is not designed for easy inspection or safe maintenance.  As a result, during scheduled production outages — which are becoming shorter and less frequent in the false belief that running ‘flat out’ increases production — maintenance of minor components must often be deferred due to access conflicts, lack of time or budgetary constraints.  This further reduces components’ functionality, often to the point where they become both useless and unrepairable.

Conveyors are powerful systems designed to be rugged and durable to deliver near-constant operation, and the belt can be dragged across piles of dirt or inoperative

idlers for extended periods of time, as long as the major functions are kept running.  If the components critical to maintaining a clean and safe work environment were made service-friendly and installed with adequate access, much of the beneficial maintenance could be done safely while the conveyor is in operation.[Fig.4]

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Figure 4 – Enclosed systems with inspection doors protect workers from fugitive material hazards while they check operation.

While most maintenance workers are skilled technicians, they rarely understand the conveyor holistically.  Conveyors are complex, integrated systems; a change to one component will often have unintended consequences for others, affecting the rest of the system.  Without a complete understanding of how conveyors are designed and components selected, maintenance becomes an exercise in finding the longest-lasting ‘band aids’ to treat the symptoms rather than solving the root causes.  Before long, an accumulation of bad choices in treating symptoms results in a system that cannot operate at maximum efficiency.

Treating symptoms shortens component life — often it’s belt life that is sacrificed — resulting in the need for increased spare parts, which in turn increases the need for maintenance labor.  The evidence of this misguided approach is easy to find — walk through a plant and look for the red tags on inoperative equipment.  Chances are the tags are dated months — if not years — prior.  Equipment is left begging for the maintenance attention that only arrives sporadically.

Safety Pays

A conveyor improvement investment would rarely be justified on safety alone, and current financial analyses do not include safety in a meaningful way.  We’ve reached a point where engineering controls, additional regulations and protective equipment are no longer sufficient to continue the trend of improving safety — instead, we must change the way we address conveyor systems.  This change must include the way conveyor components are specified, designed, purchased, operated and maintained.  Only through this approach can conveyor operators achieve the next level of improvement in reducing accidents.  [Fig. 5]

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Figure 5

An in-depth financial analysis shows that additional design time (to address the above root causes) and purchasing on the basis of true life cycle costs (for longevity) will have a high return over time.  Increased worker safety is a by-product of this methodology.  With this increase in design time, the altered purchasing habits and the increase in safety are used in the financial justification as inputs, and the return on investment is much higher than with rapid designs and low bid.

This mathematical phenomenon is exhibiting itself in reality.  A survey of the literature indicates that companies which truly focus on safety in the design and practice are more productive and operate cleaner, safer facilities.  This sets them ahead of their competitors, contributing to a higher share price.  Conveyor-owning companies must be committed to making conveyors as safe as possible, in order to maximize earnings and value.

When combined, an altered way of looking at accidents financially, a change in design methodology and a change in purchasing methodology will allow a conveyor operator to create a safer environment, increase efficiency and achieve the goal of “Production Done Safely”.

References

[1] Original Reference: Pit & Quarry Operations Handbook; Chapter 10, page 145. http://www.pitandquarry.com/pq-university-lesson-10-conveying-material-handling/

[2] Swinderman, Todd; Marti, Andrew; Marshall, Daniel: Foundations for Conveyor Safety, The Global Best Practices Resource for Safer Bulk Material Handling; Martin Engineering Company, Neponset, IL; ISBN 978-0-9717121-1-3-3 (2016); pages 442.

Todd Swinderman, P.E. / President Emeritus / Martin Engineering

Todd Swinderman earned his B.S. from the University of Illinois, joining Martin Engineering’s Conveyor Products division in 1979 and subsequently serving as V.P. and General Manager, President, CEO and Chief Technology Officer. Todd has authored dozens of articles and papers, presenting at conferences and customer facilities around the world and holding more than 140 active patents. He has served as President of the Conveyor Equipment Manufacturers’ Association and is a member of the ASME B20 committee on conveyor safety.  Swinderman retired from Martin Engineering to establish his own engineering firm, currently serving the company as an independent consultant.

 Daniel Marshall, Process Engineer, Martin Engineering

Daniel Marshall: Dan received his Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Northern Arizona University. With nearly 20 years at Martin Engineering, Dan has been instrumental in the development and promotion of multiple belt conveyor products. He is widely known for his work in dust suppression and considered a leading expert in this area. A prolific writer, Dan has published over two dozen articles covering various topics for the belt conveyor industry; he has presented at more than fifteen conferences and is sought after for his expertise and advice. He was also one of the principal authors of Martin’s FOUNDATIONS™ The Practical Resource for Cleaner, Safer, and More Productive Dust & Material Control, Fourth Edition, widely used as one of the main learning textbooks for conveyor operation and maintenance.

Martin Engineering has been a global innovator in the bulk material handling industry for more than 80 years, developing new solutions to common problems and participating in industry organizations to improve safety and productivity.  The company’s series of Foundations books is an internationally-recognized resource for safety, maintenance and operations training — with more than 22,000 print copies in circulation around the world.  The 500+ page reference books are available in several languages and have been downloaded thousands of times as free PDFs from the Martin website.  Martin Engineering products, sales, service and training are available from 18 factory-owned facilities worldwide, with wholly-owned business units in Australia, Brazil, China, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Spain, South Africa, Turkey, the USA and UK.  The firm employs more than 1,000 people, approximately 400 of whom hold advanced degrees.  For more information, contact info@martin-eng.com, visit www.martin-eng.com, or call (800) 544-2947.