Rockford Systems and Master Lock Enter Partnership on Safety Technologies

Rockford Systems LLC (Rockford, IL) and The Master Lock Company (Oak Creek, WI) announced a new joint initiative designed to accelerate the adoption of safety technologies throughout the North American manufacturing sector. The two industry leaders are teaming up to reduce workplace accidents, improve job efficiencies, and help ensure manufacturers are in compliance with the latest OSHA, ANSI and NFPA 79 machine guarding and lockout/tagout standards.

Even with strict machine and operator safety regulations in place, unguarded hazardous machinery remains a major source of fatalities, amputations and other traumatic injuries in manufacturing plants. According to OSHA, nearly 18,000 machine operators suffer non-fatal injuries each year in the United States. Rockford Systems estimates more than half the manufacturers in the U.S. do not fully comply with critical requirements for machine safeguarding or lockout/tagout.

Master Lock helps facilities create safer work environments and ensure lockout compliance through comprehensive consulting services. This partnership with Rockford Systems enables them to broaden their services to include machine guarding assessments and physical safeguarding solutions, providing an end-to-end lockout and machine guarding solution for customers. “The combination of our machine safeguarding expertise and industry knowledge, together with their nearly 30 years of expertise, comprehensive consulting services and innovative physical products, will enable our customers to rapidly identify safety deficiencies and deploy machine guarding and lockout/tagout solutions,” said Joe Nitiss, the chief executive officer of Rockford Systems. “It is exciting to form an alliance with a partner that shares our core values as closely as they do.”

In their role, Rockford Systems will provide on-site custom safety consulting services using the Machine Safety Assessment Tool (MSAT), which was jointly developed by the two companies. Performed as a stand-alone service or in conjunction with other services, the MSAT assessment helps companies identify situations that place machine operators or maintenance personnel in serious, life-threatening danger because of the absence of machine safeguarding.

“For many of our on-site lockout/tagout assessments or procedure development projects, our customers also ask for high quality machine guarding solutions. Our partnership with them will allow us to offer one-stop safeguarding systems to meet all of our customer’s needs,” said Matt Dudgeon, the director of product marketing at Master Lock. “We are excited to partner with them because they have been experts at machine safeguarding for over 45 years and are as committed to workplace safety as we are.”

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