From a machine safety management perspective, what goals are you looking to establish? Building a company safety culture, building awareness of the hazards, building the "buy in" to do things right and do things consistently is very important. It can't be done by a single person.  It takes the whole group. 

• Building competency
• having rigorous documentation
• conducting audits over time to make sure you are checking progress
• making adjustments where needed and continuing to improve
• continuing to build a better program. 

Those are all goals that need to be in place to say we've got a robust machine management program.

Machine Functional Safety Documents

Machine Functional Safety Management Plan 

If we look at the specific documents in the machine functional safety plan, typically it starts out with a top level document that we call a machine functional safety management plan. It has your top level requirements, what needs to be in place for competency, making sure that all of the phases of the lifecycle are addressed, and then identifying a clear description of those handoffs between different phases. Underneath that, we've got specific group procedures which look at the process description for that relevant phase in more detail.

Group Procedure

What is the process that we follow for a hazard and risk assessment? What is the process that we follow for identifying the safety requirement specification? What sort of outputs are expected? Are those outputs generated by internal personnel or are they a step of the machine safety lifecycle that is delegated to a trusted third party who knows exactly what that output should look like.

Project Plan

Lastly, for a machine that's being implemented for a specific upgrade program, I'm looking at the project plan tracking each document for the project. The who, what, when, where, how. Making sure we know who completed a task, exactly what they did, when they did it, where it's stored and how that feeds into the rest of the lifecycle tracking the sign off.

All of that is really important to having a rigorous program and tracking all of that information.