Control Tower 4.0: To Completely Transform Your Health & Safety Management Initiatives

Recently, ComplianceQuest published a whitepaper on why a Safety Control Tower will be a game-changer for Health & Safety (H&S) teams.

A control tower will help various stakeholders – executive leadership, H&S Director, and on-ground safety teams – keep a finger on the pulse of “everything that is health and safety-related.” But, it is critical to understand that a control tower must not be just a collection of dashboards and charts. The need of the hour is not just access to data and H&S metrics but also the ability to enable collaboration and swift “actioning” based on data.

Therefore, companies need a modern, next-generation Safety Control Tower – what we call Control Tower 4.0.

In the Safety Control Tower whitepaper mentioned above, we discussed the Safety Pyramid. The pyramid highlights the correlation between the number of major injuries, the number of minor injuries, and the number of near-misses. By reducing the number of near-misses and minor injuries, you automatically improve workplace safety standards, thereby reducing the number of major incidents.

The question is: What does it take to reduce the number of near-misses proactively? We believe it is the following steps:

• Step #1: Act on each and every safety observation, but prioritize based on risk level
• Step #2: Involve employees. Get them to report safety concerns and keep them posted on how the company is acting based on their safety observations
• Step #3: The Control Tower must include a dashboard that tracks the number of safety observations and near-misses that were acted on
• Step #4: It is also important to track the number of open actions or yet-to-be-done mitigation initiatives
• Step #5: Robust documentation is critical to enhance and continuously improve safety management efforts

Key Elements of a Modern Safety Control Tower

We believe a truly next-generation Safety Control Tower (Control Tower 4.0) will offer the following features and capabilities.

#1 – Presenting not just any data but actionable information

A modern Safety Control Tower, such as the one from ComplianceQuest, enables organizational leaders to react to and correct issues as they arise, thanks to the following key capabilities:

• Real-time data visibility from across the value chain with dashboards, notifications, and integration of multiple business systems
• Analytics gathered through root-cause analysis, simulations, what-if scenario analysis, risk analysis, and response management
• The dissemination of information to relevant stakeholders and action plans
• Monitoring of outcomes
• Business leaders or operational owners can also drill down further on certain operational metrics to deep dive and analyze any particular KPI as needed
• Our solution also leverages CQ.AI, ComplianceQuest’s artificial intelligence framework, to help leaders leverage predictive intelligence and actionable insights

It is important to note that it is not about having data for the sake of it. Relevant and actionable data must be available so it will become easy for the stakeholders to plan the next steps in terms of health and safety initiatives.

#2 – Tracking key metrics with the ability to filter as needed

A modern Control Tower will also make it easy to track important H&S metrics relevant to your enterprise. For example, the ComplianceQuest Safety Control Tower presents the following four out-of-the-box metrics, but it can be set up to track additional data points.

The four primary metrics that are tracked include:

• Total number of injuries
• Days Away Restricted or Transferred (DART) Rate – This refers to OSHA-recordable injuries or illnesses that resulted in days away from work, restricted duty, or transfer of duties.
• Total Case Incident Rate (TCIR) – The number of work-related injuries per 100 full-time workers in one year, used by OSHA to monitor high-risk industries. EHS managers can use this to track incidents and discover patterns across different functions and sites.
• Lost Time Injury Rate (LTIR) – This is used to evaluate safety performance by dividing the total number of lost time injuries in a specified time period by the total number of hours worked in that period. The answer is then multiplied by 200,000 (in some countries, by 100,000) to get the LTIR.

For most organizations, each of the above metrics is critical from a safety perspective. In our quest for modernization, we shouldn’t forget the basics and fundamental requirements of a safety management system. Additionally, it must be easy to filter and analyze the above data by location, type of injury, etc.

#3 – The Control Tower must be integrated with the rest of the EHS Solution

For executive leaders, the control tower serves as the first screen they need to view. By going through all the dashboards, charts, and data, they get easy visibility into the big picture.

It is simple to drill down and look at safety data by location, incident type, injury profile, by days away from work, etc. By looking at both top-down and bottom-up data, the safety team can capture injury trends, monitor risk levels, and plan risk mitigation efforts.

In a Control Tower 4.0 solution, the dashboards are truly integrated with the rest of the EHS workflow, including incident management, risk management, and training.

It is important to have visibility into the following:

• Status of safety training across locations
• The ability to track and monitor the progress of risk mitigation initiatives
• The current status of safety risk in the organization presented through a Risk Assessment Matrix
• The number of open action items and status of open action items

The ComplianceQuest Control Tower has some unique features that make gathering insights fast and intuitive. An interactive body map, an anthropomorphic representation of data, is used to visually present injury data for each body part, making it easy to visualize. This body map can be easily shared on Chatter, the chat app, or embedded in an email or in a presentation to be shared with other team members.

The conversations around this data can be tracked and monitored, providing full visibility into the complete process of safety management. As a result, decision-making is enabled using actionable data, facilitating prioritization and recommendation of actions for high-risk factors.

For more information on the ComplianceQuest's Safety Control Tower, request a demo here:
https://www.compliancequest.com/lp/ehs/