What causes a workplace to be unsafe? Equipment failure, miscommunication, and procedural shortcomings are all possible reasons for lapses in safety. But these aren’t the core reasons, really.
When you look at it on the most basic level, workplace hazards are usually caused by somebody making a mistake. Unfortunately, there’s no way to completely prevent people from making mistakes, but we can predict what mistakes are likely to happen and take action to prevent them.
Predicting accidents might seem far-fetched, but it’s really just a matter of collecting the right data. With the proper analysis, you can use this data to find shortcomings in your safety program. By correcting these shortcomings, you can prevent mistakes.
What Information is Important?
More data is not necessarily better. You need to focus your attention on collecting relevant information, so that you can maximize your safety returns. Some data you might find it helpful to track:
- Where and when are incidents taking place?
- Is your equipment in good condition?
- What do your employees know, and when were they last trained?
- Are your employees exposed to any hazards?
Of course, it’s very difficult to analyze data if you can’t compare one point directly to another. In order to draw useful conclusions you need to be collecting, tracking, and analyzing this data all in one place; you need an enterprise solution.
Once you’ve found a potential accident and figured out preventive measure, you’ll need to ensure that the corrective action is actually completed. You could always try to do everything yourself, but there are many situations were that’s not practical. It’s much more efficient to just have other people do it. Wouldn’t it be convenient if your safety solution had a task management system built in?
In summary, the best way to avoid accidents is to predict where they’re likely to occur, and prevent them from happening. Predicting and preventing incidents requires a complete safety data system. Basically, you need Quantum to help you predict the future.
