Preventative Maintenance
Preventive Maintenance ensures that your equipment last longer, runs as intended and has no downtime. in addition, well-maintained equipment operates safer and does not become a cause of an accident. Further, the Construction Regulations in Ontario mandate that you must maintain your equipment in a safe manner but does not specify what exactly that means. From a liability standpoint, it is ESSENTIAL that you follow manufacturer’s recommendations. If you do not follow manufacturer’s recommendations for maintenance, and if there was an accident with a piece of equipment caused by mechanical failure, you may have placed the liability on your company. Element 7: Preventative Maintenance, of the current COR audit program, when implemented is critical to the success of an organization and needs to follow the manufacturer’s recommendations and all maintenance activities are carried by a competent and qualified person.
Pre-use checks conducted by a trained operator provides a layer of protection in your preventive maintenance program and any defects, damage and irregular functions and noises are identified and recorded; so that, a maintenance person can immediately investigate and correct the issue; so that, safe and uninterrupted use of the equipment does not impact your operations.
Well maintained equipment does also protect our environment, not as noisy, no oil leaks on the ground and cleaner combustion engine emissions. All waste generated from maintenance; like old oils and fluids that have reached their useful life need to be stored, transported, and disposed of according to environmental legislation.
The current COR audit tool verifies an organization’s preventive maintenance program to ensure that facilities, tools, equipment and vehicles, compliance to manufactures and regulatory requirements. A COR Auditor will review the following:
A company maintains and inventory of all facilities, tools, equipment and vehicles.
A schedule and checklist are used to record all maintenance work. Maintenance needs to be performed as planned.
As stated above, an organization will need to show that maintenance performance is according to the manufacture’s recommendations and legislative requirements.
Where issues are found that corrective action is taken to rectify the issues and non-conformance.
Person doing maintenance activities need to be competent. qualified to undertake the work.
How overdue or defective tools, equipment and vehicles need to be documented in a procedure as to how they are managed, disposed, or removed from service.
Any organization that can provide positive responses to the above is in a good space, and likely on its way to building a positive workplace safety culture, where accident prevention is a core value.
Presented by Roger Belair and Jason Colucci - Approved COR Associate Auditors.
