In this day and age, Safety Management isn’t just about preventing injury and illness. It’s also about maintaining resilience and avoiding regulatory scrutiny. But how are individual companies proceeding? According to the data, manual safety processes are still pervasive. And they’re hurting quality control, increasing costs, and leading to lost ROI. What’s going on?
Manual Safety Management hurts quality control, increases costs
Indeed, manual processes, as found in the TrackVia survey of 500 safety managers and executives, erode quality controls and inflate costs.
How badly?
Well, nearly 90 per cent of respondents told survey-takers that they spent a staggering 1,300 hours per year assembling data into a usable format.
One unintended consequence of these major time overlays was that nearly two thirds of managers said that manual processes were causing misplacement of work orders.
What’s more, almost 60 per cent of respondents reported receiving incomplete and poor-quality data through manual data collection.
But how prolific were manual systems themselves? In the construction industry, where this data issue, nearly half of all managers were still using manual systems for data collection, incurring the risk that maintaining patchwork manual systems entails.
The ROI of going digital for Safety Management
Aside from lost time and money spent, what are the other consequences of staying manual for Safety Management? Perhaps, the biggest is the lost ROI of going digital.
Why’s that? Integrated safety management platforms have come of age.
Allowing for process optimization, digital safety management platforms are moving employers towards greater productivity and workforce accountability, as well as enhancing the context, awareness, and analysis of key decisions in real time.
These trends, in part, have contributed to improving safety cultures at the organizations that have taken advantage.
Key benefits of safety management digitization
In particular, Safety Management digitization has provided the following three key benefits:
1. Expedited incident and injury management
Digitization of Safety Management enables teams to better analyze safety incidents within platforms, as well as identify root causes, and extract lessons learned. Injury management has been expedited, too. Built-in digital communication and collaboration features, for instance, ensure that teams can respond quickly when an injury occurs, by automatically sharing important documentation, questionnaires, and guidelines with personnel.
2. Improved competency management
Digitization also serves to ensure that teams assign their best people to carry out Safety tasks based on documented prior experience carrying out similar tasks. In digitized Safety programs, personnel competencies are managed in a central location. The digital technologies deployed also provide cross-reference competencies with role requirements to ensure Safety Managers have competent people to run safe, efficient operations.
3. Inherent compliance management
In jurisdictions where the reporting of workplace illnesses and injuries must be digital, organizations reliant on manual reporting are out of compliance. Digitization helps with the substance of safety compliance, as well. Many digital technologies come equipped with workflows that make compliance inherent. Workers in the field, as a result, spend less time finding approval shortcuts and more time improving control quality.
Of course, digitized Safety teams don’t just react quicker, with better people, who go above and beyond mandated best practice. What are the other benefits of digitized Safety Management? Download our guide to the 10 Benefits of Digitization in Safety Management for more.
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