Clarion Safety Systems is in a unique position to supply product manufacturers, workplaces and public areas with the most up-to-date, standards-compliant safety signs, labels and markings. We work with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), which was founded in 1918, to enhance competitiveness of business and the quality of life in the U.S.
Risk assessment and human factors expert, Anne Mathias, explains the importance of the product risk assessment process. Communicating risk through warnings is a critical component of risk reduction, particularly when it is not practical to design out or guard against a particular hazard. Here, effective, best practice safety labels are key to reducing risk and protecting people.
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Video transcript:
[00:00:05] You can design a personal vehicle like a tank so that if it impacts anything the driver itself will be okay, but from a utility standpoint and a feasibility standpoint that’s not going to happen. It’s just not practical to do that. There’s an inherent level of risk that our society accepts. The goal of the risk assessment process is to reduce those risks to an acceptable level, so that you have a safe machine, you have a safe product, you have a safe process. The ANSI B11 standards are a group of consensus standards for the machine tool industry. They’re written by people involved in this industry with the best practices to improve safety and create a good machine. One particular example of a risk assessment might be a heavy-duty handheld power tool and the question would be ‘is it going to apply too much torque to the users arm and hand?’ We could reduce the maximum torque that’s available but that takes away our utility because it’s no longer a heavy duty tool and that’s what our users are wanting. We could put on a permanent side handle to help stabilize that extra torque, but the side handles often only used in about 10% of cases. So the user may reject that as well, as now it’s too bulky of a particular tool. It comes down to that users interaction and that training and warnings and instructions as opposed to anything that we could do from a design standpoint in that particular tool. So you’re likely going to need some safeguarding, some engineering controls, some warning and what that balance is and how you optimize that balance this really depends on your specific application. [00:01:45] The ANSI Z535 standards on warnings and signage and instructions are an important guide for the development of warnings and instructions. It’s helpful in terms of what the formatting is expected in terms of standardization and it gives guidance to manufacturers that are trying to develop their, their own warnings. You want to talk about the potential hazard and the consequences of not avoiding that hazard, perhaps give some methods on how to avoid that hazard. Symbols can often be very important especially if you have an application where there’s multiple languages being spoken, if you have an international application and often that can add clarity to your particular warning labels. You don’t want to have a warning about every potential hazard on a particular label, it won’t fit on the label, the text will be so small people will ignore it and not pay attention to it. When we’re looking at a warning label and trying to design an effective warning label, we want to make sure that this label is clear and concise. You don’t necessarily want a giant warning label that affects the ability to grip the power tool, or to adjust the power tool. You don’t want something that’s so tiny that it might not be noticeable for the user. It’s not simply a matter of taking a generic warning label and slapping it anywhere on a machine it might be worthwhile to investigate where the operator interacts with that machine so where they might be able to notice that warning label, which is a very important factor in warnings. If you’re going to be in a very hot or dirty or dusty or abrasive environment for a particular label you want to make sure that your label stays on. Designing warning labels can be a tricky business, it’s often very helpful to have expertise that knows the standards that are out there, that has read the human factors studies perhaps on this particular issue and it’s being recognized as an important state of the art throughout multiple industries. [00:03:49]
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