What is driving machine safety adoption? What are some of the key questions that companies are trying to answer when it comes to machine safety? For industrial facilities, whether it's a chemical plant, or a machine application, it ultimately comes down to facility risk management. Companies want to provide a safe place to work. They want to protect their workers from harm and unnecessary losses. When we look at what drives this risk management and understand them, we can look at the impacts of different areas from a regulations standpoint. 

The machinery directive, especially within Europe, has a major impact on how machine safety is addressed both by the suppliers and operating companies. The machinery directive soon will be moving from a directive to a regulation. It will have the weight of law behind it and will have a significant impact in terms of how machinery safety is handled in the European Union. And it's not just there. Australia has some very strict requirements. Countries from Africa to Asia to North and South America have a lot of different specific regulatory requirements that need to be looked at from a machinery standpoint. In the United States, there are general OSHA guidelines that are requirements for providing a safe workplace. 

There are also specific requirements for machinery that protect against common machine hazards. All of those play a role in shaping how organizations look to address risk. 

Insurance requirements are something that tend to be important in US organizations. Insurance companies can either come in after an incident, or after a claim,  investigation if the organization is following best practices. Is it a company that they want to insure ? Is the insurance company taking on undue risk?

Then there’s the stakeholder expectations within an organization. Looking at objectives for quality and safety improvements as they get rolled out within an organization can also have a significant impact on how companies adopt safety. Lastly on the machinery side, there are a lot of application standards, from more general broad categories such as ISO 12100 for risk assessment or ISO 13849 for how safety systems are implemented. There are some very specific application standards to specific safety function types, specific machine applications that we'll talk about a little bit more.