Safety Analytics: 3 Extremely Useful EHS Dashboards

Peter Drucker, the world-renowned management guru, says, “If it cannot be measured, it cannot be managed.” Organizational health and safety is no exception to this. Analyzing, measuring, and tracking key performance indicators of safety processes is crucial to continuously improving safety management and building an enterprise-wide culture of safety.

To accurately understand the safety performance, the EHS team must track leading and lagging indicators across the enterprise. According to an Aberdeen Group study, organizations with real-time visibility into EHS data experienced a 42% reduction in safety incidents compared to those without such visibility.

Safety leaders need visibility into incident data, safety observations, near-misses, and audit and inspection data to identify and mitigate risks. This helps with proactive and preventive safety management to minimize incidents.

From Data to Insights - The Role of Safety Reports and Dashboards

In a connected enterprise, access to data is not a challenge, but drawing insights is. A dump of tons of data is difficult to process and analyze. The data must yield insights, which can be actioned as quickly as possible. As analytics experts call it: Time-to-Insights (TTI) is a key factor to consider. Choosing a modern EHS solution that enables this will help safety leaders achieve their objectives.

It should provide insights into leading and not just lagging indicators. Lagging indicators are retrospective and provide information about incidents or accidents that have already occurred. Examples of lagging indicators include injury rates, lost workdays, and workers' compensation claims. These indicators help to evaluate the effectiveness of safety programs in the past and provide insights into potential areas for improvement.

On the other hand, leading indicators are forward-looking and provide insight into the potential for future incidents, safety mishaps, or environmental pitfalls. Examples of leading indicators include the number of safety inspections, the frequency of safety training, and the number of near-misses reported. These indicators help identify potential risks before they become actual incidents, allowing for proactive intervention to prevent accidents.

Without having a finger on the pulse of all leading indicators, it’s impossible to build a safety management system that is proactive and predictive.

By tracking both leading and lagging indicators, EHS teams can better understand the effectiveness of their safety programs and identify potential areas for improvement. This information can be used to develop targeted interventions to design a safety strategy that is not just reactive but also preventive, proactive, and predictive.

It requires the setting of ‘SMART’ goals, which stands for:

Specific: Define EHS metrics with clarity
Measurable: Make sure they are easy to track and monitor
Achievable: Empower your EHS team with the right digital tools, people, and processes so your quantitative goals are realistic and attainable
Relevant: Set goals that align with your overall objectives, priorities, and values
Timely: Have a specific timeframe or deadline for achieving your goal

To understand how to leverage leading and lagging indicators to improve your safety management system, download our whitepaper:

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3 AI-Based Analytics and Dashboards for TTI

To achieve TTI, a cloud-based EHS solution must help interpret the data and have the following crucial components:

Access to enterprise-wide data on safety
An AI-based solution to run advanced analytics and generate dashboards and reports to extract insights
Convert insights into actions based on criticality and business impact
Monitor impact and continuously improve safety performance

It must enable safety leaders to generate intuitive and interactive dashboards and reports for quick and actionable insights. Some of the key dashboards essential for safety analytics include:

Dashboard #1 Injury Insights

Visibility into injury data helps understand the impact of safety lapses, identify common root causes, implement controls, bolster safety training, and ensure workplace safety.

An anthropomorphic visualization that uses a body map helps to identify the body parts where injuries occur the most. This can be viewed at the corporate and site levels, enabling safety leaders to quickly identify in which locations what kind of injuries are happening and how frequently.

In this dashboard, you can see metrics and trends:

Days without injury
DART Rate (Days Away, Restricted or Transferred)
Total Case Incident Rate (TCIR)
Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR)
Impacted body parts and types of injury
Injury data by location and across the organization
Injury trends – are we moving in the right direction?

Dashboard #2 – Safety Audits

A robust audit management process is necessary to assess and improve the overall effectiveness of the safety management system. Periodic audits help spot systemic issues, process gaps, and safety risks that are highly likely to cause a safety event.

For taking proactive corrective actions (CAs) and enhancing the effectiveness of the SMS – a robust process for safety audits is critical.

The audit management dashboard captures the following aspects:

Overall audit schedule – as documented by the lead auditor
Number of overdue audits, in-process audits, and open audits
Data and analytics from audit findings
Audit findings by location
Audit findings by type
Audits with open actions items
Gather insights and intelligence from audit data
Analyze audit finding reports
Trigger post-audit CAPAs and notify relevant stakeholders to plan the next steps
Risk control measures and open action items are driven to completion

Dashboard #3 - Action Management

The insights garnered from audit, inspection, injury, and training data give the safety team enough data points to understand the major safety risks (and in which locations). The control measures can be planned and implemented based on the severity of each of these risks.

The action management dashboard provides an overall view of closed, open, and upcoming actions by location. This helps track the recommended actions’ status, emphasizing completing pending actions on time. Additionally, with access to the latest data, it becomes easier to understand the impact and effectiveness of these actions.

Along with other dashboards for tracking training status, inspections, and documentation management. Together, these dashboards make the business and safety leaders identify opportunities for improvement and continuously upgrade the safety management system to improve workplace health and safety.

ComplianceQuest’s cloud-based EHS software built on Salesforce empowers safety leaders with dashboards and reports that help them combine reactive, proactive, and predictive approaches to improve compliance and workplace safety.

To know more, visit: www.compliancequest.com