There’s no industrial process entirely without risk. And these risks can have effects all across the shopfloor if they’re triggered.
It’s no longer good enough to produce a static register of risks and safety procedures. With changing equipment, personnel, conditions, and materials, the way you record and manage frontline risks must be more responsive.
Agility in health and safety management is critical to safeguarding your processes and staff. And digital technology is here to help you do it.
Read more to learn:
Why traditional methods don’t work
Paper-based administration is on the way out. We see it everyday from our clients. They want to remove paper from the shopfloor as much as possible.
So why is this relevant for risk management?
The traditional system doesn’t function very well. Even when it’s operating as it should, it has very clear limitations.
Here’s just a handful:
- Siloed information: Risk assessments are completed, then stored away in a filing cabinet, folder, or on a spreadsheet, cut off from the action and at risk of becoming irrelevant.
- The tail wags the dog: logging risks is reactive, based on past incidents rather than taking full account of the situation. Very rarely is it practical to take a proactive approach.
- Slow reaction speed: logged risks can sometimes take days, or even weeks, to act upon, and can be overly contingent on shift patterns and other variables.
- Lack of visibility: it’s not possible to get an immediate overview of the risk landscape, let alone real-time information from the shopfloor.
- Admin burden: taking care of all this paperwork is a huge drain on time for HSE professionals; time that could be spent on preventative actions.
And even beyond these obvious practical problems, there’s another reason many manufacturers are now looking to digitalize risk management.
Risks aren’t isolated
Risks evolve. And each can have effects in multiple areas.
These days, a shopfloor ‘risk’ is an integrated concept. It’s no longer a simple case of ‘this spill may cause a fall’ when that spill may have broader consequences.
For example, let’s stick with a small spill. Some oil has leaked from a machine and onto the floor. This actually represents four kinds of risk.
- Safety: It poses a risk to workers, as it creates a slip hazard
- Operational: This spill could cause delays or divert resources in managing it
- Quality: This spill might cause product contamination, resulting in scrap or defects
- Environmental: the oil might be corrosive or noxious enough to require a hazardous waste cleanup
An agile, responsive system for cataloging risks would recognise the multi-faceted nature of shopfloor hazards.
It would allow you to register this risk as a single event with interconnected effects.
And crucially, it would allow you to see the nature of risks beyond safety. Ultimately, these codependent risks impact your production, your efficiency, and, therefore, profitability.
Why you need to be more proactive with Risks
Your job shouldn’t just be to report and record risks.
As we’ve said, risks are multilayered with sometimes unpredictable effects. A slipping hazard is much more than a safety issue alone.
Now imagine instead of simply measuring the impact of a risk, you’re able to prevent it from happening at all.
That’s the crucial difference between your traditional methods and a connected, digital approach.
The mPS helps you move beyond the limitations of a paper-based system of risk management.
A paper system can only give you lagging indicators. The mPS gives you leading indicators.
Here’s what we mean:
- Lagging indicators: these are recorded after the fact. So, a failure happens, and a risk is identified as a result. Examples could be number of accidents, Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR), scrapped material, number of complaints, etc.
- The issue? The risk has manifested itself, and it’s too late to prevent it. Like the old saying, you’re closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.
- Leading indicators: these help you predict risks before they become a failure. They measure how you’re preventing these failures, and what more you can do to stop risks developing. Examples might include % of safety observations completed on time, TPM audit scores, and time-to-close for corrective actions.
- The benefit? You’ll notice that ‘risk’ factors less in these measures. That’s because hitting your targets here will mean risks don’t develop. This is a benefit that goes well beyond safety.
To reap the rewards of a proactive approach, you need to make risk management an integral part of your daily operations.
And that’s exactly what we’ve aimed for with our software.
How the mPS makes risk management agile
Agility in an industrial context is about making your systems and processes more responsive and more open to improvement.
It’s one of the benefits of the mPS. By taking your process management off paper and local servers and moving it to a multiplatform software, you solve a few problems at once.
Now you have a system on tablet and mobile, allowing you to work across multiple areas on the fly.
This allows information to flow more freely across your organization. Data is now something that moves with your people.
This fact alone unlocks several core benefits
Real-time reporting and escalation
With everyone connected to a central risk management system, workers on the line can quickly report risks and near-misses to HSE agents, helping to reduce delay between reporting and corrective action.
Analytics and dashboards
A central repository of frontline HSE data allows for greater transparency and oversight from management. Producing dashboards and other important monitoring capabilities from a centralized store of data will help you integrate risk management with your lean processes, removing it from the silo.
Joining actions and risks at the hip
Now that you can generate actions alongside risks, you address issues at the root. So from safety through to cost optimization, you’ll ward off risks across multiple areas.
Making risks a part of your routines
Our goal is to make risk management a core part of your continuous improvement cycle. Traditional methods, and even many software solutions, treat it as a separate issue.
We want to blur those lines and help you make risk prevention key to your day-to-day.
To make this easier, we’ve integrated our HSE Risks module with Audits.
Risks can now be created directly from the Audits app, meaning you can tag and detail a risk whenever it appears without needing to stop what you’re doing.
You can assign relevant actions to the right people, and follow the progress of a flagged risk alongside the item you’ve created.
Now, risks are used much like other improvement drivers of our software, and allow for greater agility.
Now’s the time to level up your risk management
Achieving a proactive, digital approach to risk management takes initial time investment. Nobody can promise overnight improvements here.
However, the hassle of changing your system is more than worth it.
The longer you leave your paper system intact, the more it’ll weigh you down.
The time for digitalization of risk management is now.
Talk to our team to learn how the mPS can adapt to your conditions, and how risk management can be a driver of lasting improvement.
