How Many Forklift Near Misses Did Your Manufacturing Facility Experience Today?

What causes a near miss in manufacturing? Do you know how many near misses occur each day on a forklift? Can near misses be avoided? Are they even important? As you can tell, we’ll be discussing near miss accidents in the facility caused by lift trucks, or any mobile equipment. First, let’s define what a near miss in manufacturing means.

What is a Near Miss?

OSHA has developed a Near-Miss Incident Report form on their website. OSHA define a near miss as a potential hazard or incident in which no property was damaged and no personal injury was sustained, but where, given a slight shift in time or position, damage or injury easily could have occurred. Near misses also may be referred to as close calls, near accidents, or injury-free events.

SIERA.AI is certainly glad that the form exists, but capturing the information digitally, as we will discuss here, will allow management to better understand the origins of a near miss in order for action to take place so future accidents can be averted.

Dissecting a Forklift Near Miss

Many times, a near miss in manufacturing is disregarded. Nothing happened, so there’s no need to be concerned about. Let’s talk about this real-life example that was shared with SIERA.AI. A manufacturing facility has an area where workers need to go underneath a structure either to put items away, take items out for it to be delivered to the assembly line workstations. As the space is deep, the body of the worker is fully inside of the space. As the worker emerges from the space, a forklift was close to the open space and noticed movement coming from the space and slams on the brakes. A split second faster in speed, a second later of coming from the space…and an accident would have occurred.

• How often does this occur? Don’t know.
• Has it happened before? Don’t know.

How can it be determined something that needs to be addressed if it is not tracked?

Digitally Tracking Near Misses

By digitally tracking near misses in manufacturing, you’ll be able to capture information and make action-based decisions to avoid the near miss turning into a potential high impact which leads to injuries, damage or even death.

The S2 Digital Inspection with Impact Detection by SIERA.AI tracks near misses. That’s on the front end. Now, let’s talk about what happens to the data. When an event occurs, the AI machine learning technology determines if it is a high, medium or low impact on the settings you defined in the system. All else is a near miss. When management goes into the telemetry Dashboard, the manager will be able to view the number of near misses immediately. Now comes the fun part.

1. Set the date. You can take a look at the data by a single day, 5 days, 1 year, or its lifetime. That’s up to you what you are trying to determine. For instance, maybe you want to investigate which day is most vulnerable to near misses. Maybe it is by shift, forklift operator, or the forklift itself.
2. Now you want to find out where the near misses are occurring. Based on the data you’ve viewed, you can visit the location where most of the near misses are occurring to determine the ‘why’. Here you can make adjustments to the space and begin to test if the changes made will reduce the amount of near misses. You’ll be able to track in the Dashboard and understand if the numbers are decreasing. If not, you have further work to explore.
3. As we mentioned above, near misses can be attributed to a specific driver. The driver may be new and needs further training. If the driver is experienced, the operator may need tailored training to get better at a particular task.

Take Action!

With near miss AI machine learning technology working today to avoid accidents from developing, why haven’t you taken advantage of it? It’s time and cost effective. Contact us at sales@siera.ai to take control of your near miss in manufacturing so you can concentrate on bigger issues…like taking care of your customers.