As most Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) professionals know, incidents can occur daily. They happen in varying forms and levels of severity, such as injuries, chemical spills, illness, and more. To manage these incidents properly you must have the ability to document all incidents and collect as much data on them as possible.  Automating your EHS system can help by enabling you to streamline the process of tracking and reporting on these safety incidents throughout your organization.

By reducing the time addressing any incidents that occur through automation, you will ensure more efficient safety management within your organization, particularly in the area of job-related incidents. By reducing and correcting the number of job-related incidents that occur today, you can effectively lower your risk of future incidents occurring in the future, thus encouraging a culture of safety.

This article will explain how you can effectively shorten the cycle time of addressing all incidents with the EHS system’s automated tools, so that you can take action faster, without the risk of missing anything in the process.

How Automation Puts You in Control

All incidents that take place within your organization should be recorded, investigated and taken action on to prevent recurrence and to ensure continual improvement. Automation of the incident process within the EHS system does just that. With it, you can record all incidents in a single, centralized location, and collect the information needed to conduct investigations. Using this data, the necessary corrective and preventive actions can be put into place to reduce the chance of the incident recurring.

In the process of managing incidents, there are additional core processes that the EHS system can integrate with that will help make the process easier while giving you greater control over the outcome.  Here’s how.

Uses risk management tools to guide the process of decision making: Most organizations will use risk as the benchmark for common challenges and improvement areas. Risk-based data is based on quantitative measures that will help improve decision making and encourage continual improvement measures.

Risk Management enables your organization to identify risk and take steps to mitigate those risks throughout the process. This systematic approach to addressing adverse safety events helps to mitigate the risk of recurrence and provides visibility into top risks within the EHS.

Using Risk within the EHS enables you to identify trends that occur in different departments across your organization, which will give you insight into the root cause of all incidents. You can then use this data to establish preventive measures to prevent recurrence. Additionally, Risk Management provides you with an expansive look into all of your EHS events, providing you with the visibility needed to make more strategic decisions for your organization.

Minimizes the amount of corrective actions: Automation of EHS and incident management can enable you to filter event by their risk, thus helping you to potentially minimize the amount of corrective actions needed. . The trouble with Corrective Action is that if there isn’t a systematic and objective way to determine the severity of the event, then organizations are left wondering how to best prioritize.  Risk helps to provide you with that filtering mechanism.  Less critical incidents are immediately corrected, and only truly systemic issues are investigated further in the Corrective Action process.

Corrective Action also allows you to determine the root cause of an incident so you can take measures to correct the systemic issue, and then determine that the measures taken were effective.  Risk tools can be applied here to measure any residual risk and determine whether a risk was reduced to acceptable levels to prevent the incident for recurring.

If a high degree of risk is still present, you will know that the corrective action was not effective and you can then take a different approach to lower the risk. You can then repeat this process until you’ve reached a level of risk that is satisfactory to your organization.

Includes safety reporting to identify trends:  If you have the ability to report on your data you will be able to use that information to provide continual improvement throughout your organization. Reporting will allow you to track and trend all incidents within your organization, so you can identify what caused each incident and apply and necessary corrective actions to effectively reduce the risk of recurrence. You can even pull data into OSHA and other regulatory forms, to make the process of incident reporting even more efficient.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve discussed how automating the processes within your EHS System can be ideal for finding incidents, helping you to manage them more efficiently and prevent them from happening again. We also described the additional EHS processes that the Incidents application integrates with to result in a holistic system for addressing all incidents and reducing the number of incidents that occur within your organization.

Processes such as Corrective Action and Risk Management are automated to help you more easily identify risks, reduce them to levels that are acceptable to you and correct any high -risk incidents.  Additionally, the ability to report on this incident data lets you see if there are any trends in incidents throughout your enterprise.

The result is a process that is fast, simple and that puts you in control of all incidents.