Most organisations have a process for reporting incidents. Many have a process for investigating them. Far fewer have a reliable process for what comes next — tracking the corrective actions that investigations generate, verifying they have been completed, and demonstrating that to regulators and auditors.
This is the gap where incident management most commonly fails.
Reporting and investigation are only half the process
When an incident occurs, the immediate focus is on recording what happened, understanding the cause and determining what needs to change. This is the visible, well-understood part of incident management. Most organisations handle it adequately.
The harder part is the follow-through. Investigations generate actions — procedural changes, engineering modifications, additional training, new controls. Each of those actions needs an owner, a deadline, a verification step and a clear record of completion. Without that structure, actions slip. They get recorded in a report, noted in a meeting, and then quietly forgotten as operational pressures take over.
The result is an open loop — incidents are investigated but their corrective actions are never properly closed.
Why spreadsheets create the problem
Many organisations track incident actions in spreadsheets. This works up to a point — actions can be listed, assigned and updated. But spreadsheets have no workflow, no escalation and no audit trail in the sense that regulators mean when they ask for one.
North Star Shipping, which operates the largest wholly UK-owned fleet in the North Sea, experienced this problem directly. They had a well-developed incident recording system built on linked spreadsheets, but as their Safety Manager Paul Craig explained, there was "no mechanism for tracking progress and closing-out of actions — which left us with an open loop."
His summary of what was missing is precise: "We had three basic needs that were not being met adequately — traceability, accountability and visibility."
What action tracking adds to incident management
An action tracking system does not replace the incident reporting process. It picks up where the investigation ends.
When an investigation concludes, its findings are entered as discrete actions in the tracking system. Each action is assigned to a named owner, given a priority, and set a realistic completion date. The system then manages the workflow — sending reminders, escalating overdue actions, and requiring evidence of completion before an action can be formally closed.
Critically, every step is logged. Who created the action, who updated it, what evidence was attached, when it was verified and closed — all of that is recorded automatically. That log is the audit trail that regulators, class inspectors and client auditors want to see.
For North Star Shipping, the Pisys Action Tracking system was configured to handle their incident and accident data directly. Peter Henderson, Pisys Director, notes: "Most incident reviews and most audits result in actions, and so a system with action tracking at its core provides a natural solution to incident tracking and management. The advantage with our system is that it is built around the idea of a high governance workflow, so you already have a strong sign-off and audit mechanism built in."
Closing the loop on near misses
The value of proper action tracking extends beyond formal incident investigations. Near miss reporting generates its own actions, and those are at least as important — a near miss is a signal that something in the system needs to change before the incident actually occurs.
Paul Craig illustrates this directly: "Two months ago we had a safety investigation after a near miss. To avoid recurrences, we set up a system of alerts in the Pisys system. Just this morning the action came up and I sent out an alert on this topic to all ships. In the old system the incident would have been deemed closed. But with the Pisys system we can set up measures that will directly help reduce accidents and incidents in the future."
What regulators actually look for
When MCA, Lloyds Register or any other regulatory body audits a shipping company's incident management, they are not only checking that incidents were reported. They are checking that investigations were completed, that corrective actions were assigned, that those actions were completed and verified, and that the organisation can demonstrate all of that through records.
A spreadsheet rarely meets that standard. An action tracking system with a full, timestamped audit trail does.
For North Star Shipping, the result was straightforward: "Because the front end mirrors our old information forms, we've been able to get up and running quickly. And we can run reports simply when we need new things."
Paul Craig's conclusion: "This is an extremely important system for our company as it encompasses all of our QHSE records which are a critical part of our RIDDOR compliance. It works, and we trust it to work."
Where Pisys Action Tracking fits
The Pisys Action Tracking system is not an incident management platform in the sense of a dedicated incident recording tool. It is designed to manage the actions that every incident management process generates — and to do so with the governance, audit trail and reporting that regulated environments require.
If your organisation already has an incident reporting process but struggles with what happens to the actions that come out of it, that is the gap the Pisys system is designed to close.