For all industries, businesses and organisations it is essential to keep a structured and organised working environment. In the mining industry, as is the case in many other industries, certain disparities in employee recklessness or improper maintenance of their workplace can have possibly fatal consequences. This is why it is imperative to have a thorough daily mining environment inspection. This inspection checklist can maintain safety standards in each workplace zone at the mine site, as well as helping all those in the control room, office, camp to keep their work in check too.
A daily mining or working shift inspection should be completed by a supervisor, manager or appointed competent employee and can include checks such as inspection of work areas and bays for spills or untidy sorting; inspection of walkways and emergency signage; identify, assess and analyse risks, inspection of lighting and barricading or inspection of appropriate washing facilities. All these factors can be instantly checked via use of mobile device features such as the camera which gives the inspector the ability to take pictures and annotate them using the touchscreen. Using attached reference material in the form of previous reports, manuals, drawings or ideal conditions, it is much easier for inspectors to visually establish if the check passes or fails or there is any risks presented. Likewise for inspection of other factors such as PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) or emergency equipment, the smartphone or tablets’ camera can be used to scan barcode/RFID to ensure that they match the compliance requirements detailing the PPE or emergency equipment’s issue or use. Where there are deficiencies, risks or issues like problems in safety kits or protection equipment, there is the possibility for the inspector to record problems via general typing or speech-to-text services. When marking a failure, risk or issue, this can result in a trigger notification to the relevant parties who can react in real time and for example choose to shut down certain areas or operations.
