Inspections, health and safety checks, and audits play a big part as the leading safety indicators for many organizations. Setting quantitative targets for management, supervision, and EHS teams is very common across many industries. On the other hand, the quality of these activities is often being questioned:
• Are the companies getting the expected value from those activities?
• Is time being used efficiently?
• How efficient is the output of those inspection activities?
• How do you measure the performance and efficiency of inspections?
I believe there are many more questions that you may ask or have already asked (or have been asked) before. The time aspect is an important thing to consider for EHS inspections. You may hear figures like 4 hours per day per EHS supervisor or an inspection per 200 man-hours.
What can be done to establish an effective EHS inspection system that can help control unsafe acts and conditions, generate robust improvement actions, and ultimately prevent accidents?
As technology is constantly evolving and improving; it may have the biggest potential to bring. Digitization of the inspections, automated reporting systems, and using artificial intelligence and computer vision are the first things that come to mind.
There are many advantages of utilizing technology for this routine part of Health & Safety. The first is, of course, the time aspect – why spend 4 hours a day if artificial intelligence can do this for us by:
• Analyzing safety issues 24/7 with a high accuracy
• Generating objective results and outputs
• Notifying in real-time
• Providing data that all your colleagues can access simultaneously
So, you don’t need to have a lot of file binders, keeping the completed checklists that mostly no one is looking at after the inspection is completed.
On-the-go safety inspections
The seamless integration of mobile apps further enhances the efficiency and accessibility of EHS inspections. Users can conduct inspections and audits directly through their mobile devices, accessing necessary documents and entering data in real-time, which streamlines the process and ensures accuracy and compliance. With mobile apps, inspection data can be entered on the go and accessed immediately, allowing for quicker decision-making and follow-up.
This capability is particularly transformative in scenarios where:
• Immediate data entry reduces paperwork and clerical errors.
• Real-time sharing of inspection results facilitates faster resolution of identified issues.
• Geo-tagging capabilities ensure precise location documentation for compliance and auditing purposes.
• Standardized mobile checklists ensure consistent data collection and compliance across all facilities.
By using mobile-optimized checklist templates, you can perform much more efficient safety inspections from anywhere. These templates streamline the process, making it easier to maintain compliance and thorough oversight.
Streamlining these processes also reduces the labor costs associated with inspections and prevents costly regulatory penalties by ensuring ongoing compliance.
Effective safety incident reporting
The other aspect of digitalizing this process is reporting unsafe acts/conditions and incidents. Companies have many behavioral safety programs, observation card systems, etc. to encourage reporting. But we all know that it is impossible to report all the incidents, especially the unsafe acts and conditions. Let’s assume all of them are reported; how can this process be managed in terms of time, resources and efficiency?
Even reporting an incident and following up on corrective actions requires days for management and EHS teams. So again, if this can be done in the digital world of today, it makes perfect sense to utilize the technology, get a clear picture of your workplace in terms of unsafe acts and conditions, and even access a detailed analysis of those.
You may ask – what should be done with this data? If you receive 200 reports a day, how can this be managed, even with the applicable technology? This is a great question to think about, and my answer to this would be prioritization which requires human involvement.
For example, if you are receiving 100 hard hat unsafe act reports per day, it doesn’t make too much sense to focus on all the individual reports. But if you take corrective action, such as an EHS campaign, a safety talk, or even a simple poster, and if this corrective action reduces your hard hat reports to 40 per day, isn’t this a great way to reduce the risk of exposure or improve PPE compliance?
Let’s take another example, a high critical working at height unsafe act – here, the real value lies in the identification of this activity, which maybe you weren’t aware of before or even not assessed in your risk assessments. Focusing on this one unsafe act can significantly help you, as taking corrective action to prevent its recurrence can help eliminate the risk of a serious workplace accident in the future.
To prevent the occurrence of this unsafe act, which can result in much worse outcomes, you need to understand the root causes. If it is approached as a robust incident investigation, you can extract much more value and come up with appropriate mitigations. One of the ways to operationalize this, you can include the questions, and root causes that you had gathered from the unsafe act. Some example questions include:
• Is there a job hazard analysis or safe work instruction for rigging the materials?
• Does the rigger have proper training? Does the training include safe loading/offloading of the materials?
• Is there proper access equipment nearby?
• Is there a process to report these types of hazards at the workplace? Do people have the right to stop their activities when they encounter these types of unsafe conditions?
• Is the lifting gear certified and appropriate for the load?
So now, we not only have the image and video for the “working at height” related unsafe act; we have also deep-dived into the possible causes and added these controls to our digital inspections, which will be routinely monitored. Isn’t AI, computer vision and digitization of the inspections a perfect combination for the control of workplace hazards?
With the given examples and variety of the EHS scenarios like those above, we really need a helping hand from technology. To identify the unseen hazards, save time through reporting and inspections and take robust corrective actions to prevent them before any serious accident takes place.
And yes, AI and CV have significantly enhanced our ability to identify unsafe acts and conditions. With the launch of Intenseye’s EHS Suite, which consolidates Task Management, Inspection Management, Incident Management, and Audit Management tools into one integrated platform, we’ve substantially improved the effectiveness and efficiency of workplace safety management. This module, accessible through both desktop and mobile devices, empowers EHS teams to conduct and manage inspections on the go, ensuring operational flexibility and responsiveness.
This seamless integration across devices not only streamlines safety processes but also ensures that safety measures are more adaptive, immediate, and comprehensive, delivering unparalleled value to our customers by enhancing their ability to preemptively manage and mitigate workplace hazards.
This will certainly be an important element to close the loop and will help make workplaces much safer!