Understanding AI’s Role in Productivity and Safety
At the ASSP show in Denver a couple months back, there was a panel discussion on AI’s role in productivity and safety. The panelists discussed how AI will impact EHS professionals as it pertains to safety, productivity and innovation. The panel hit one of the topics head on: the fear of using AI. With so much AI being thrust upon us in our everyday lives, do safety professionals need more AI integrated into safety practices? But to stay ahead in the EHS field, understanding AI’s role in productivity and safety is mandatory. For the sake of this article, we’re going to keep it narrowed to powered industrial trucks.
AI might be a newer concept to many, but AI in forklift safety has been around for approximately 10 years. For SIERA.AI forklift safety system, it is based on AI technology and machine learning. These technologies are what makes it possible for safety to be at the forefront of and reduce forklift accidents whether it be it for pedestrians or objects. Let’s take a further look.
Let’s Break It Down
As we discuss AI’s role in productivity and safety, let’s talk about each one separately in order to understand some of the basics. We’ll begin with safety.
Safety:
OSHA compliance: make that digital transformation from paper to digital. This does increase safety by knowing the health of the forklift prior to beginning the shift. In order to ensure a far more accurate answer, use the randomization feature to mix up the questions so they don’t know which one comes first second etc. Use these answers to better manage the fleet.
Pedestrian Safety and Object Safety: These are the center of a forklift safety system. Being able to identify the difference between a person and object and provide warnings to the forklift operator is key for safety. Why?
Partial Human Detection: Say for instance a person is bent over or on all fours behind a pallet or boxes and the only thing visible is part of the shoe or a coupe of fingers sticking up from behind the pallet. The intelligence of AI technology and what it has learned, it will identify and warn the driver that there is a person. This is a critical difference for this reason (and yes, there can be others) if the forklift operator decides to move those boxes or pallet without knowing there’s a person behind it, you can guess what will happen: severe injury to a fatality.
Near Miss Detection: This can also be thought of as ‘almost an accident’ ‘close call’ and the like. Having the AI technology to identify these and track it will bring insights into hot spots within the facility. The result of the intelligence allows you to determine where troubled areas are forming and allow you to make the necessary changes to reduce the risk. You’ll know if you are successful by monitoring the near miss hot spots with the telemetry dashboard.
Impact Detection: Get to know where these impacts are occurring. Just like near miss detection, you’ll quicky find out where and who the impacts are at. Now you can use this intelligent data to make changes to avoid growing risk.
Productivity:
As you can already tell, by fixing the safety issues, you automatically will increase productivity. But let’s take a look at a couple more.
Decrease Downtime: The more time your forklifts are in operation, the more money you make. The less impacts, near misses or pedestrians / objects you are less likely to hit, the more productivity you will receive.
Fleet Health: As we discussed, with an OSHA and beyond, healthy fleet, the more life you get out of the investment. If you get to run the fleet an extra year or four because the health of the lift truck has been tended to, what type of savings will that have?
Learn more about an AI-based forklift safety system.
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Contact us today at sales@siera.ai or call us at (512) 817 0702.