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The root cause of lapses in safety and compliance procedures is typically the failure to properly gather, interpret and act on data from a variety of business sources. Problems that organisations have encountered are that the development of a Health and Safety (H&S) policy does not necessarily mean that an effective H&S management system is put in place. There are various avenues people may follow in managing Health and Safety and meeting tighter regulation around compliance. An overview of the Advantages and Disadvantages of each option follows:

Paper Based Health and Safety Management Systems
Advantages
• Personnel familiar with existing paper based systems
• Requires little change management
Disadvantages
• Significant administration costs
• Time delay in accessing information
• Inhibits effective sharing of key data
• Prevents development of comprehensive view of risk status.
• Reactive, end¬ pipe solutions access to real time information
• Data integrity
• Duplication of data in multiple sources

Reliance on consultants alone (without health and safety software)
Advantages
• Develop and establish H&S policy Improves H&S culture across the organisation
Disadvantages
• Monitoring system required to implement procedures needs time, money and personnel commitment
• In case of accident difficult to prove compliance – no audit trail
• Reporting to management costly and time consuming
• Labour intensive and high administrative costs High annual running costs
• Lack of EHS knowledge in¬-house
• Data typically stored in disparate islands of data (Excel, Word and Access) leads to data inaccuracies and lack of reporting capabilities

A tailored automated Health and Safety Management Systems solution
Advantages
• Reduce administrative overheads
• Fits unique organisational structure
• Embeds H&S culture in daily processes
• Automated action tracking
• Closed loop monitoring system
• Instantly create multiple indicators to assess H&S performance
• Instant access to real time data
• Ongoing Return On Investment
Disadvantages
• Most useful if based on an adequate H&S structure –outputs of the system depend on the inputs
• Initial capital investment
• Initial resource commitment

In fact, data from key operational processes outlined in a H&S policy such as incident recording, audits and risk assessments will be fed into paper based systems comprising a chaotic mix of faxes, emails, spreadsheets and stand alone “islands” of data. Critically, these data systems are not integrated and work autonomously of each other causing a range of difficulties including duplication of tasks and delayed access to Real Time information.

Operating in this manner generates an ‘open loop’ information system which lacks a control and feedback mechanism, is people intensive and significantly more expensive than centralising and automating business processes onto one platform.
The optimal solution to these problems is the implementation of an automated system which can help identify high risk activities quicker and manage the implementation of comprehensive corrective actions plans across your enterprise.

If you have a requirement call/email us now to arrange a meeting on +44 (0)871 050 0880 (then select option 1) or email:enquiries:protectlife.com

Tags: A tailored automated Health and Safety Management Systems solution, Reliance on consultants, RiskICE Health and Safety Software, Why use RiskICE