At a glance
- Accurate, site-specific work instructions prevent downtime and reduce safety risks.
- COSOL’s approach ensures efficiency, reliability, and safer operations across heavy industries.
On a mine site in central Queensland, the night-shift team were instructed to lift a dump body from a Cat 785D haul truck, so they printed out the procedure from CAT SIS. The document stated the weight of the body at 27t and the team proceeded to remove the body pins and secure it to the 35t workshop crane.
Unexpectedly, when they went to lift the body, the crane went into overload. They found carry-back in the body that accounted for the extra weight. This needed to be removed to safely remove the body. However, when they went to re-install the body pins to dump the carry-back, the pins wouldn’t go in as the body had moved. Now they had a problem.
The truck was stuck in the workshop and the team had to secure the body by other means and remove the carry back by hand.
The team then discovered that the site used a body which weighed 30T, 3T more than the standard OEM body, meaning the total weight of the lift was over 35t, including tooling and carry-back.
The result was a 16-hour delay to the job and exposure of the team to additional safety risks.
For typical heavy process industries, the cost associated with unplanned downtime can represent 1-3% of revenue, and potentially 30-40% of profits annually. Even in 2001, these costs accounted for up to 3% of asset value per year for large capital equipment.
How can this be avoided?
Using Safe Work Procedures with a step to check the truck body is emptied before proceeding to the workshop, AND including the actual weight of the body used on site would have reduced the chance of these delays. We make sure that all Work Instructions are:
- Easy to read: be concise and clear
- Easy to understand: use language that is consistent and simple
- Easy to access: make sure everyone who needs it can find it easily
- Most importantly, accurate, up to date and site specific
