A healthy and safe work environment is  a “hot  topic” nowadays. Still, safety management is not self-evident in a lot of companies. Every year, hundreds of thousands of accidents occur resulting in injuries and absenteeism, and in worst cases with fatal consequences. Maintenance plays an important role in creating a safe work environment. Poorly maintained machines are a danger for the people who work with them. But also the performance of maintenance work needs to be carried out in safe circumstances.

Inetum's Rimses Safety solution actively contributes to safety by integrating the management of safety measures in the maintenance software. Work can be performed more safely through a good follow-up of safety measures, communication, monitoring of safety issues and safety standardization.

Rimses has been extended to include safe maintenance management by integrating safety in the maintenance application for work permits, safety measures and lockout-tagout (LOTO).

The solution starts with determining the safety risks. Health and safety advisers can then draw up safety rules for those risks. Validation of the safety rules can be applied both before and after the execution of work.

It may also be necessary to seclude a zone where work is being performed (Lockout-Tagout). Rimses enables the set-up of lockouts per zone. Locking and unlocking can only proceed through predefined procedures. The result of a procedure is displayed with a colour indicating the safety status. All the safety measures are included in the work permits.

Because Rimses integrates safety in the operation of the maintenance software, there is optimal communication between all the parties involved with safe working conditions: the people carrying out dangerous jobs, the health and safety advisers, the maintenance department and the production operators.

Additionally, safety is now controlled through changes in the status of a work order when work is carried out. A great deal of attention was paid to the transition of this status so that a change of status can only occur as a consequence of an executed safety procedure. Because information and monitoring are available in one system, delays and errors in communication between all stakeholders are eliminated, which benefits safety.

Within the system rules based on templates and a safety risk matrix can be applied to all operations that involve certain risks as a consequence of the type of work, and the place and the type of location of the work—e.g. welding activities on the roof of a production department. Standardizing and harmonizing the safety measures contributes to safer working conditions, because no measures are forgotten in the preparation of once-off work orders or in preventative maintenance.

In many production companies  the release of production on an installation is subject to strict execution of a number of actions and compliancy  to rules. With the LOTO function the release of an installation for production can take place in a controlled way. For instance, in a food company, production cannot be restarted after maintenance work without first executing a procedure in Rimses stating that the installation needs to be cleaned following maintenance work and is safe once again for the production of food.

By integrating security into Rimses, a very good configurable environment is created within which the safety measures in the work order work flow for the required work can be activated.

In Rimses the Maintenance department immediately receives information on the status of a work order and why a work order cannot be carried out due to a safety sub-status. All safety authorization processes are also included in the workflow of a work order, in addition to the existing authorization processes. Rimses notifies the right persons that their action is required in the safety process—e.g., for the validation of safety rules or for locking or unlocking locking points (Lockouts-Tagouts) for LOTO. Necessary validations and required working permits can be followed up.

All required safety measures before and after the execution of maintenance work by both internal maintenance staff and maintenance by external parties are grouped per work order.

In the Rimses start window a safety dashboard provides an immediate overview of the LOTO situation for a geographic location. The geographic tree structure immediately shows the LOTO-lockouts, their status and colour code.

Various documents support the safety process. Documents can always be linked to the safety measures that apply to a work order. A Rimses safety report provides an overview of all the safety measures that apply to a work order. Working permissions and safety certificates required for a process step are also part of Rimses Safety.

In addition to documents for internal maintenance, there are also specific documents for work subcontracted to external parties.

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Rimses Safety