Additional functionality now available:

• Investigation Timeline
• Causal Analysis comments
• Faster corrective action updates
• Full size images
• File upload changes
• Leading / Lagging indicator summary
• Injury details – body part, nature of injury and injury cause

Investigation Timeline

Administrators can set a report to have an investigation timeline on any report type in the system through the settings.  This will then allow you to specify dates and times and a description of the investigative activity that was undertaken.  Along with this you can upload files that are relevant to that investigation step.

Once this is complete, we have a mechanism where you can step through the timeline to review each step that you will see in the sidebar beside the incident.

Causal Analysis comments

When choosing your causal analysis items, we now have an area for comments that pertain to each particular cause.

Faster corrective action updates

In the corrective action emails, we have changed things just slightly to allow people to quickly click the email link and then choose to complete or cancel the corrective action without having to log in to Incident Check.

Full page images in PDFs

In the generated PDF for a report, there is now the option to attach full size images to the end of  the report.  This is very helpful when there is fine detail on an image that the thumbnail does not show.

File upload changes

We have modernized the file upload portion of the report page to allow either images or files to be uploaded, and to have multiple uploads running at the same time.

Leading / Lagging indicator summary

A quick report, the first of many, that will start focusing on Leading Indicators.  This is an area of focus for Incident Check in general in the upcoming weeks and months, as we are seeing more and more customers really looking to leading indicators to ensure that things are being handled pro-actively.

Injury details

Now, when a report dealing with an injury is entered, you have the option of adding details on the injured body part as well as  the nature of the injury and the cause of the injury.  Note that this cause is different from the overall causal analysis in subtle ways.  With Causal Analysis, a person is trying to get at the reasons for the incident happening.  With an injury cause, we are focusing on the more specific details of the injury itself.

As always, feedback on these features is appreciated and if you would like to discuss them, feel free to email or calla t any time.

1.  Better Group Level Statistics

Statistics now have a way to break them down by the Groups that are set up in the system.  In our use at 3CIS, we have Wireless, Cabling, and Software Divisions in the company.  You can now choose the ones you would like to see and export the graph or data to provide comprehensive, side-by-side comparisons of the performance of each division.

2.  Multi-Groups per User

Additionally, we added the ability to have users be part of more than one group under a given label.  Again, in our case this means that a user from 3CIS can be part of the Cabling Division, the Wireless, or the Software division, or any combination of the 3.  Previously we limited this to only 1 choice but the newest change reflects the reality at many of our customers’ companies – people are often part of more than one division or other group.

To do this, you set up a User Account for Group Access as per usual, but instead of a drop-down to choose the group, we have a combo box where you can Control-Click to select multiple items, as in the screenshot below:

Essentially, they argue that we should look at them as a failure, not a success, as they are leading indicators of incidents.  Citing the Process Improvement Institute, across many industries there are between 50 and 100 near misses recorded per serious incident, and about 10,000 smaller errors occur during that time.

It is also a great read.

With Incident Check, we have been focusing on that for years.  We provide the necessary tools to track near misses and provide roll-up statistics to show how many near misses are being recorded.

There has been 1 stumbling block for locations, however, and that is our mandatory latitude and longitude.  But, getting this information is as simple as firing up Google Maps.

For example, 3CIS headquarters is in Edmonton.  To get a lat/lon pair, simply zero in on the building in Google Maps, right click, and choose “What’s here?” from the menu.

You will then see the latitude and longitude in the search box at the top, like in the following screenshot:

However, we also want to track the amount of money involved in the other types of incidents.  These can be a powerful motivator for people to really understand what is happening at all levels in a company, and to realize substantial cost savings.

Many times people do not want to track these as the idea of a higher incident count is not appealing.  Lost a ladder at a job-site?  1 more incident this month.  Computer equipment stolen from head office?  Another one.  If someone looks at this and sees a large incident count, then they might draw the wrong conclusions, the thinking goes.

The industry already does a good job of this currently however.  The difference is that those incidents are not reportable, whereas classes of injuries are reportable.  We are doing our best to educate people on this, as the value of tracking losses can be a great way to have Incident Check pay for itself and more.

In the safety area, particularly, company and workplace safety is everyone’s responsibility, so we would not want to stop people from using the best system out there for entering incidents, near misses, and hazards – Incident Check.

No “Participation Tax” here.

1.  Alerts on Custom Incident Types: Following up to our immediately successful and well used Custom Incident Types, we added the ability to alert on those incident types when setting up automated emails.  You will now see this in the Alerts section of the Settings area (Admins only, of course).

2.  Incident Breakdown Chart: In general we hear a lot that Pie Charts are Bad.  But, in this case we could not resist and truly feel that they are a great upgrade over the previous bar chart.  To illustrate the point, consider the following (fake data from 3CIS):

We feel that this chart gives us the most immediate impact of determining what we need to work on.

Many of our customers need to limit access to reports for different divisions of their companies.  Currently, we have two access levels – Reporters and Administrators.  Reporters add and edit their own reports and can only see what they have entered, whereas Administrators see and have access to everything.

However, there is an in-between access level that we have now addressed.  The challenge from the technical point of view was how to provide this functionality in a way that supports all of our various customers from the many different industries that have a strong safety component to them.

We have done this through our report groups, the current mechanism for ‘tagging’ reports with company specific information – things like Division, Contractor, Operating Company, Supervisor, and many others defined by our users.  Now you can assign users into one or more of these groups and they will only see the appropriately tagged reports.

For people contemplating using this mechanism, all that is needed is to decide what characteristics you would like to use to restrict access, and then use the Settings area (available to admins only) to make this a locked and mandatory group.  Then simply add people to that group.

We are very excited to hear how our customers start using this feature and we are looking forward to feedback.

With Incident Check, we focus on the root cause analysis and provide a completely customizable  set of factors that are set up by your safety professional.

We start with a basic set, but you are free to remove all of them in order to set things up to work best with your company.  Our initial set consists of Immediate and Root Causes.  Under Immediate causes we have Unsafe Conditions and Unsafe Practices, under Root Causes we have Systemic Factors, Peronal factors, and Job factors.  We feel this is a very good base for people to use to really get at what is important – figuring out the underlying reasons for incidents and doing our best to eliminate them.

This is highlighted in our Pareto Charts that show the top 80% of factors leading to incidents, near misses, or hazards.  And we find that these charts become much more valuable over time.

Second, most of the people asking are used to dealing with 2 different types of situations:

• In-house IT departments
• “Enterprise” Software Sales

With Incident Check, we have taken a different approach – Software as a Service (Saas) and we have specifically targeted safety management systems, incident tracking systems, incident management systems, etc. (as they are variously called in the industry) because we see a perfect fit in the safety area for a product that brings together best practices and procedures and provides great value to many companies.

For many customers, they have previously had (or tried to have) solutions built by in-house IT departments.  These can be successful, but many times IT departments are overworked, resulting in long times to development and large budgets.  Or just simply not having the capacity to deliver. And at the end you have a product that met your needs 8 to 12 months ago when you asked for it initially.

The other model we see in this industry is the “Enterprise” sales.  People working for those companies will explain how amazing their software is and how it can do everything, and will talk your ear off about everything except price.  Getting a price on a system from them is akin to pulling teeth, which is odd considering that you want to give them money.  Eventually you will get a price but they are built on formulas that Einstein would have problems with so you are left with nagging doubts as to if you received good value for your money.

3CIS looked at the safety industry and thought – “No company uses safety as a trade secret, so we can collaborate to provide the best system out there.”  The information sharing nature that occurs in this industry benefits everyone at all levels.  Think about it – if you found a formula to reduce accidents in the workplace for a company you work for, would you hoard that information and use it in recruitment materials?  We don’t think so, which leads to people sharing their research, results, etc.

When it comes to providing a system to meet the data-capturing requirements and followup, we follow the same line of thinking to capture feedback from existing customers in order to make the product better for ALL customers.

Don’t let the price throw you off – we have all the features that companies need, and our product continually evolves to keep up with changing requirements and best practices in the industry.  And that beats “Enterprise” any day.