Safety in the maintenance garage and protecting its workers is an essential factor in any agency. From instilling a ‘safety culture’ in employees, continuing education and the utilization of technology agencies can continue to be on the forefront of the latest trends.
Dave Varnes, director of bus maintenance for the Maryland Transit Administration explained that a safety culture is one of the essential factors. “The number one thing that we’ve always been working on is the culture and having a good safety culture.” Varnes said that MTA also continues to update its facilities. “Some of the big points are that maintenance shops are dark and dreary, so we’ve found (benefits from) increased lighting with LED lights so people can actually see what they’re doing and modern maintenance facilities. We actually have two one is completed and one is being built right now with extra features, like fall protection and a lot of safety items that go alongside with safety. I think the biggest thing is that safety culture, you need people to understand how important safety is and make it into a number one priority.”
Varnes said that ensuring safety is a combination of both culture in the workplace, as well as continued training.
“There is a lot of heavy equipment. You need to have education and oversight as well, we’ve got a good safety department that really keeps us in check,” Varnes said.
MTA executed routine safety checks to ensure that there aren’t any safety issues that will arise in the future.
“We really try to be in it. We want to identify any hazards and make sure that the most current safety features are in there,” explained Gerald Lynott, Jr., acting chief safety officer of the office of safety, quality assurance & risk management for MTA. “To take that a little bit further, once it’s up and running and everyone is certified anytime that there is a modification to the equipment or process there is a safety modification procedure. That allows all the departments that have an interest in that, evaluate the change and sign off on that to ensure that we’re not introducing any hazards. One of the things that a lot of places do is that you focus on one task, and not what is downstream.”
Lynott has said that both the relationship and interaction with the safety committee has grown since he first began at MTA.
The safety mindset
MTA works to provide an open line of communication to its workers about new processes or pieces of equipment.
Varnes said, “Education and training are important. You can supply everybody that personal equipment and training, but you have to change the mindset of those people about how important safety really is.”
“If everyone at all departments at all levels had a safety mindset. Not just maintenance, but our contractors, our visitors, our customers then everyone would be safer,” said Lynott. “A safety standpoint can mitigate any safety hazards that we see.”
Keeping an open line of communication with other agencies and organizations can also be an asset of continuing safety culture.
“I think that networking is another key. The more that you network with the other agencies out there, the more that you get to see the trends and get their views on what they’re trying to do,” Varnes explained that MTA gains information by attending conferences — including APTA — and speaking with other agencies about what they are doing to further safety standards.
“It starts with the mindset and then it is all about staying current. How can we change our environment?” Lynott added. “We do a lot of good things here, but you can always look at ways for improvement.”
Utilization of technology for predictive maintenance
One of the ways to promote a safe workforce is to keep vehicles from experiencing catastrophic failures all together. Technology continues to be prominent aspect of the management of transit. The Internet of Things (IoT) can be utilized to determine issues before they arise. Early alerts to potential maintenance can assist in the safety of workers; due to the fact that assets do not be need to be inside the shop maintenance workers don’t have to navigate around or be on the vehicles. Utilizing technology also means that agencies spend less money on its fleets, and can mitigate funds elsewhere.
Clive Newell, president and CEO of Fleet-Net Corporation said, “Now with the newer vehicles they have the on-board diagnostics that are constantly sending information back to dispatch about the engine. It could be an engine overheating or a failure of the vehicle. That immediately comes into our system and we get a little bit of a faster response that way. Is there really a problem, and if so can we get someone on it right away, so the time getting that back to maintenance is shortened.”
Fleet-Net’s software also monitors how the maintenance is executed by collecting diagnostics. This is beneficial for the maintenance shop’s safety factor in that it can determine if tasks are getting completed on time. Newell said that it can determine if the mechanic is not trained well, or if there is some other issue as to why things are not getting completed on time.
“The success is rated by the fact that the vehicle doesn’t come in with the same problem. By capturing that labor and comparing it on every work order that we generate — we have who worked on it, the time that was spent — and then comparing that against standard, we have a way of seeing that the problem was being address properly and that inspections are being done on a timely basis as well,” said Newell. “The last thing that you want is to have a major break failure and have an accident.”
ThingTech provides an asset management maintenance program, which is also aimed at mitigating the time that vehicles are in the shop.
“We provide a solution that, our asset management maintenance program allows for the automation of the instruction process. We have tools, we have the web app as well as the mobile app that give our customers the ability to really inspect assets and facility equipment to make sure that they are operating safely and they’re operating the way that they should be,” Tim Quinn, founder and CEO ThingTech explained.
ThingTech captures data to determine what issues are on a vehicle, lessening of time for maintenance workers having to inspect and locate the failure or potential failure of the parts.
“We capture enough data on work orders against the asset, we can issue multiple types of work orders and the types of work orders that go out are preventive maintenance work orders, corrective maintenance work orders, inspection work orders and safety work order,” said Quinn. “We have tools that allow our customers to assign these work orders in an automated fashion to make sure that the asset is maintained correctly and is operating safely as possible through a workflow engine and a rule based engine that makes sure that all of the assets out in the world are operating as safe as possible and have been inspected and everything that goes with that.”
