We use Report Groups as a “tag” for reports, leaving this generic enough for our many varied companies to use as they see fit.  Some examples are companies tagging reports with Divisions, Truck #, Crew #, Project ID, Rig #, Supervisor, and many many more.

While Incident Check always had email alerts, now administrators will have the ability to send emails based on the Report Group, allowing for increased flexibility in alerting your users.

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.

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.

A key component of our safety program is to identify general issues that our workers face based on the upcoming season.

In winter, cold and icy conditions play a huge factor in planning; likewise in summer we are on alert for extreme temperatures in the other direction, meaning plenty of sunscreen and water out in the field.

What about the milder seasons – spring and fall?  Well, with the [eventual] arrival of spring her in Alberta, issues that have been noted in the past are allergic reactions.  We have to be aware that insects now share the workspace outdoors, and pollen from plants can be heavy in the air.  For workers with allergies, proper preparation can mean the difference between completing a job safely and effectively and lost time due to the complications of not having medication.  Anyone allergic to bees is responsible for carrying EpiPens and our workers all have First Aid training, but reminders at the beginning of the season get people in the right frame of mind and raise awareness to the issues they may see in the field.

To ensure that we remember these, we note items such as these in our Actions Calendar.  I like to refer to the Actions Calendar as “Corrective Actions that are not tied to Incidents”.  By putting them in as a recurring action, you will get reminders and have a calendar layout that will remind you to bring it up at the appropriate safety meeting.