Safety Incidents and Situation Awareness Amongst Maintenance Personnel in the Food Manufacturing Industry

Enabling high levels of situation awareness (SA) represents an essential design element of a human-centered work environment. SA has been studied extensively in the fields of aviation, power transmission, and transportation but has received much less attention in the manufacturing work environment. In this article, 52 maintenance safety investigations resulting from recordable injuries occurring over a 72-week period in a multinational food manufacturing company are analyzed from a SA perspective. It was found that 20 of these incidents were the result of SA errors while 18 were not; a total of 14 incident investigations did not provide enough detail allowing for an appropriate determination of the incident’s SA-relatedness. We argue that this analysis contributes to a better understanding of the causal factors involved in maintenance safety incidents and subsequently aids researchers and organizations in developing more effective procedural, design, and training modifications.