The Government of Western Australia's Department of Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety recognises companies who have achieved excellence in work health and safety. Companies who can demonstrate excellence are recognised at the Work Safety Awards. These awards recognise outstanding solutions and innovations designed to minimise, eliminate or manage a workplace health and safety issue or risk in Western Australia.
At the 2019 Work Health and Safety Excellence Awards, WesTrac submitted our Elimination of Live Work (ELW) Project and were awarded a certificate of merit.
We entered our ELW Project under the category of 'Best Solution to a Work Health and Safety Risk'. The vision for our ELW Project is to:
Accelerate development and adoption of leading practice designs to minimise the risk to health and safety when performing 'live work' on Caterpillar machines through end user engagement - using technology and innovation, sustained by standardised safe work procedures and an engaged workforce.
We define 'live work' as:
Any task (e.g. testing, commissioning or fault finding) where the machine's system is un-isolated and the employee(s) is required to enter the machine footprint, other than doing the same task from in the machine cabin or outside machine footprint.
The ELW Project was launched in mid-2018 to recognise and address near misses and significant safety events occurring at WesTrac, whilst contributing to lowering the worldwide incident rate of disabling injuries and fatalities associated with hazardous energies by sharing the information and lessons learned with our customers and with Caterpillar.
In short, the ELW Project aims to remove our technicians from the line of fire while working on equipment.
Our ELW Project involves a group of 20 team members who work together to identify risks within our business associated with live work. Once a risk has been identified, the team identifies possible innovative solutions, eventually choosing the best one to implement across our business. They achieve this by collecting & analysing data, collaborating with stakeholders, engaging front line employees and brainstorming solutions.
Choosing a solution to run with is only the start of a long journey to minimise or eliminate a risk. The ELW Project Team is responsible for drafting associated workplace procedures and monitoring the risk to determine the solution's success. Often, a solution will evolve, change and be tweaked until the risk is minimised to an acceptable level or eliminated. It's an ongoing process, not a 'set it and forget it' approach.
To-date, the ELW Project has implemented solutions to more than 30 risks. Examples of these risks include:
An example of a solution is the use of a GoPro camera with a mounted lamp to detect an oil leak on live equipment when there is low visibility.
The ELW Project Team is currently working hard to eliminate over 90 risks in the business - #LetsDoTheWork
Nothing is more important than keeping our team members safe. The ELW Project is an example of our 'Safety' value in action. Read more about our values by clicking below.
