Over my career in safety, I have found more often than not that maintenance supervisors and their staffs do not want me around. They have enough on their plate to do; they do not need the safety consultant to find more things needing to be corrected; more work for them to do.

It is the rare maintenance person who is eager to have an objective person come into his or her workplace and find hazards that could cause injury to people and/or damage to property. When I work with such a person, it is a joy. There is a camaraderie between the maintenance person and the safety person with both people wanting the best for the organization.

Working together, we both find unsafe or inefficient work situations, and we discuss the most effective methods to fix the identified problems.

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Q: Is a forklift certification valid from one business to another under OSHA rules? Can a delivery driver operate a forklift at a customer facility if he's certified with his company or does he need to be certified by the customer's facility to operate their equipment?

A: The training and qualifications of forklift operators are issued with respect to the types of equipment used and the environment in which they are used and they are not entirely portable.

If, in moving from site to site your operators do not encounter machines or local hazards that are significantly different those they were trained and found capable of dealing with during their original training then no further training is required. However, there are two important factors to consider here:

1. It is very unlikely that the issues/hazards specific to the equipment and site will not change between multiple sites and,
2. OSHA regulations require forklift operators to be "evaluated in the workplace."

That being said, it would be very prudent if not required of you to ensure that your operators are made familiar with the differences in the equipment and site conditions at each location they drop off at and at the very least are evaluated and designated competent to operate the machines they are assigned to use. If the equipment is similar, this could be done in 15 minutes - just be sure to document it!

I know this could be a daunting task but remember, there is no need to conduct a full blown training class at each location as you only need to focus on the differences between sites and equipment.