While some businesses still use paper and spreadsheets to handle the needs of complex health and safety management programs, in the past couple of decades thousands have turned to more streamlined software products specifically designed to make the whole process of managing workplace health and safety easier and more straightforward. As companies get bigger, processes get more complex and it becomes much harder and more time-consuming to record, input and export health and safety data to and from different ‘data sinks’, be they paper forms, electronic documents, emails and spreadsheets.
For example, look at 1984’s disastrous Bhopal gas tragedy. In the aftermath of the devastating explosion and gas leak, which resulted in nearly 20,000 deaths over the following quarter-century, Union Carbide, the company associated with the explosion, implemented a system to manage its environmental, health and safety data in order to mitigate the chances of future accidents and, ultimately, improve occupational health and safety conditions. However, in time it found the system — which relied on paper and isolated software products — an insufficient means of managing EHS data and turned to a streamlined software solution to improve performance, save time and resources and shift to a more proactive model of compliance.