If you ignore a lock out tag out procedure, people can get killed.

In a big plant with heavy duty and hazardous energy sources, heat sources or flammables, a lot of people can get killed.

Lockout tagout programs are not important, they are vital. They are often ignored, however, because of poor logout tagout training, or because the process takes too long to implement and can be confusing.

One of the newer solutions to these problems is targeted, specific lockout tagout software.

You have heard the stories. When hazardous energy isn’t controlled during maintenance because lockout tagout training wasn’t followed, people can get electrocuted, burned, fractured or lose limbs. Lockout tagout procedures are designed to shut down equipment and isolate it from any hazardous energy source before work is done. Lockout tagout procedures always specify that any hazardous power source be “isolated and rendered inoperative” before any maintenance or repair work is done. When equipment is unknowingly energy charged because of a failure of the lockout tagout process, ugly things happen.

New lockout tagout software can do make the process smoother and more coordinated. Lockout tagout software can integrate several maintenance or repair procedures together that are linked by energy sources, alerting workers that more than one process is happening, and what one group is doing affects another. Scalable lockout tagout software can incorporate work being done at several sites simultaneously.

Many lockout tagout software offerings contain training and procedure modules to make processes easier to understand and follow. This can be especially important in confined space (silos, sewers, conduits) work and confined space training, including rescue work that is dangerous for everyone involved.