Improved Incident Visibility for Better Profitability – with a Next-gen EHS Solution like ComplianceQuest

The global Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS) market is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 10.2% from USD 5.3 billion in 2019 to USD 8.6 billion by 2024, according to a market research report. The drivers for this growth include the need for real-time visibility and stability in business operations to achieve higher levels of efficiency, accuracy, and security in organizations.

Additionally, among the various industries, the energy and utilities sector is expected to contribute the maximum to this growth — due to the need to keep pace with changing regulations, high-cost of failure of safety or environmental parameters, and a crying need for well-planned risk mitigation in this segment.

Why Automate your Enterprise’s EHS Process?

Today businesses are spread out geographically, having operations as well as customers in different parts of the world. This creates many requirements from a workplace health and safety point of view. Some key considerations for an enterprise would be:

1. Ensuring the safety and well-being of its employees and creating safe workplaces in all the units.
2. Ensuring customer safety by delivering quality and safe products to them.
3. Implementing a complaint management system in case of any defect in the product to ensure proper return, repair, or replacement.
4. As each region has its own safety regulations, businesses are required to be compliant with the regulations specific to the region they are based in.
5. Improve incident management by enabling employees to report events and near misses in a simple and anonymous manner, if required, and providing management with visibility into data to analyze risks, assess the root cause, initiate corrective actions, and implement preventive measures.
6. Transparency and traceability of the automated solution provides assurance to employees about management commitment to safety, thereby improving the quality of the work environment.

For businesses on manual systems, the chances of slipping up on any of the safety or quality aspects are very high due to possible human errors that may creep in. Also, in businesses with a high level of process complexity, keeping track of all the interrelated activities can be challenging.

Manual systems make documentation and reporting very difficult, increasing the workload of the employees. As a result, near misses and seemingly minor incidents may go unreported and follow-up action not taken. The likelihood of errors in data also increases. While on the one hand, it can increase operational risks, but the management does not get a unified view of enterprise-wide data, limiting the effectiveness of the decision-making process in effecting continuous improvement for quality and safety aspects. This increases the risk of future events as well as the corrosion of employee trust in the system.

Physically storing paper documents, retrieval and security are the other aspects that make manual systems ineffective for quality and safety management.

Automation of Health, Safety and Especially Incident Management is a No-brainer

One Canadian crude oil company with four locations throughout Western Canada was using a paper-based process with Microsoft SharePoint, Word, Excel, and a mobile field-data collection app for its QHSE (quality, health, safety, and environment) program management.

As a result, the company was unable to ensure a closed-loop between maintenance and quality processes. It was also extremely difficult to access and act on health and safety metrics, incident metrics, and so on. There was a dire need to automate the quality and safety processes with a scalable solution that provided an enterprise-wide view of data in real-time.

It implemented ComplianceQuest’s enterprise-level QHSE software natively built and run on the Salesforce platform. Standardizing all its processes on a single, centralized platform improved productivity and (very quickly) effected a 30% reduction in Incident closure time.

We put together a detailed case study on this customer’s journey here,

Improved Incident Management – Thanks to Data and Automation

Automating the quality and safety system made data available on incidents and near misses from across the enterprise. The management was able to view dashboards that helped them to identify, analyze, and correct hazards and prevent future recurrence. Even those out in the field were able to upload incident information so that geographic disparity was no longer a hurdle to reporting events. This improved the overall process of incident management, enabled informed decision-making backed by data, and made continuous improvement (CI) to reduce risks possible.

The five key benefits that the company experienced as a result of automating their QHSE system and incident management process include:

• Improved Productivity: By reducing the manual effort, employees were able to focus on their key functional areas, improving productivity, enabling speedier resolution of issues, innovation, and an increase in profitability.
• Automated Incident Management: Automating incident management workflow allowed the company to take a more proactive approach to incidents and near misses, thereby reducing the risk of future events. Traceability of the incident workflow and closure increased employee trust, resulting in them being more participative in the company’s growth.
• Improved Communication: Automating the quality and safety workflow enabled better tracking of the incident management process right from detection to closure. Seamless communication between the relevant teams became possible through automated notifications and alerts.
• Centralized Data Access and Control: A central dashboard provides on-demand access to real-time data, reports, and events-related documents, facilitating collaboration between teams located in disparate locations.
• Improved Decision Making: With improved oversight and visibility, the management could devise better strategies for incident management and the resolution process. Assigning roles and responsibilities, establishing escalation protocols and initiating automated corrective actions became intuitive. It also helped in proactively assessing risks and implementing preventive measures.

Read the detailed case study here.

Find out more about CQ’s Incident Management software. If you would like to centralize your incident data, near misses safety observations, or automate the process of performing an investigation or implementing corrective action contact us now.