Carbon Insulation provider adopts near-miss manager
Our Scottish Customer is the sole producer of carbon insulation with it's parent Group and is a R&D Centre of Excellence.
The HSE manager described the safety issues he faces on a daily basis 'The site is a busy one with a lot of people and materials moving around. Our production facility combines several potentially hazardous processes to create carbon insulation and we rely very heavily on the skill and experience of our staff to keep everyone safe. A key element of our safety management is the identification of what we call near misses - conditions which have the potential to cause or contribute to an incident if left unattended. This could be as simple as an obscured hazard warning sign but we could also be facing equipment failure leading to a potential chemical escape or a major electrical hazard causing a fire or explosion '
'Our senior management team had previously identified an opportunity to improve our existing near miss reporting system which although effective, relied on a paper based process, with staff having to manually complete a form which then had to be delivered to the HSE team for attention. This had the potential of creating delays in any preventive action.'
We also have a high number of contractors who perform critical work for us, and we found that they were less likely to report a near miss in a timely manner simply because they were unfamiliar with the forms we used. Ideally we don't want any barriers to get in the way of any of our staff or contractors reporting a hazardous situation.
We currently use the Pisys permit to work system for all our control of work tasks and it is such an easy to use and robust system that we contacted Pisys in Aberdeen to see if they could help us . Fortunately they were able to very quickly supply us with their near-miss management tool which is part of their 'Pisys 360' HSE suite . It operates in more or less the same way as the permit system so staff were happy to start using it immediately. It runs on tablets and staff or contractors can log any near miss they encounter across the business. We have a number of locations ranging from our production facilities to office and car parks and we are able to use the system anywhere.
As soon as an entry is made, myself or an HSE colleague are alerted and we can take appropriate action. Since we started using the system last year we have seen a huge improvement in the reporting of near misses and our staff are more engaged in the process since they can be easily notified as any mitigation takes place.'