The Problem
In April 2009, Bar XH Air introduced a formal Safety Management System (SMS) within the organization to ensure compliance with all applicable laws and regulations regarding safety in the workplace. SMS is a manual paper-based system that allows employees to inform their supervisors if they are aware of any safety threat to themselves or others in the workplace. Although the formal safety process was in place, it was necessary to further enhance the process so that the reporting of and response to safety related issues could occur in a timely and effective manner. In addition, management could focus efforts on root cause analysis and risk management for the appropriate safety issues. It was also necessary to have access to detailed trend analysis so that proactive steps and risk mitigation could be effectively identified and executed. ProcessMaker helped Bar XH Air enhance their SMS by automating the process and thus allowing employees to quickly report safety issues online irrespective of their location and notify appropriate management to respond in timely manner. In addition, it helped achieve the following goals for the business:
- Provide an online safety reporting system accessible to all employees.
- Distribute safety reports for review, assessment and action to appropriate personnel.
- Monitor the status and progress of safety reports submitted.
- Maintain a centralized repository for reporting, trend analysis and measuring key performance indicators.
Pain Points
- Could not cost effectively maintain and track completed paper reports.
- SMS Coordinator spends a large portion of time managing the paper generated from the process rather than overseeing compliance to safety procedures.
- Timely updates to employees regarding management action were difficult to fulfill.
- Could not quickly retrieve a particular case.
- Difficult for management to understand the problem areas related to safety and what impact their decisions were having on safety in the workplace.
- Understand the impact in the workplace as a result of safety-related decisions.
- Difficult to effectively control and audit access to safety reports.
- Manual process could not cost-effectively scale when the organization grows.
The Solution
- SMS Online Process: An employee fills out a ProcessMaker form in the workplace or from a remote location.
- Preliminary Review and Investigation: Based on the nature, severity and casualties on the reported incident the appropriate department managers, safety officers, executive managers are notified via email. The link in the email provides a PDF version of the reported incident.
- Employee Notification and SMS Coordinator oversight: The submitter is kept up to date via email as tasks in ProcessMaker are completed. The SMS Coordinator can efficiently view all cases in progress and those that need immediate attention.
- Root Cause Analysis: Management conduct a root cause analysis of the reported incident in ProcessMaker and the completed PDF report is compiled and maintained on a secured file server.
- Reporting: The SMS data from ProcessMaker is periodically uploaded to a reporting database and monthly trend analysis reports in Excel are complied for management.
Additional Features / Customizations
- A file archiving system for each safety issue reported. All artifacts including the output documents generated from ProcessMaker and copied by a ProcessMaker plug-in to an SMS tracking number folder. This folder provides secured access to the appropriate personnel to view artifacts related to a particular safety report.
- Approval Matrix for automatically determining the department manager based on the department impacted by the safety issue.
- Report Importing System uploads the data from ProcessMaker to an Excel spreadsheet for reporting purposes.
The Value Created
Increased
- Accuracy and timeliness in reporting a safety issue from any location, with an easy to use browser-based online form.
- Document management capability as all artifacts related to a particular safety issue are accessible from a single repository with the appropriate access controls in place.
- Safety culture awareness within the organization and transparency in handling all safety-related issues.
- Management accountability to respond to a safety issue and conduct root cause analysis and risk management.
- Access to safety data for operational and management reporting.
Decreased
- Training costs due to the intuitive and interactive graphical interface for reporting a safety issue.
- Notification duration to submitter and appropriate personnel as each related task is completed.
- Response time to address a safety-related issue.
- Effort to generate management reports based on the safety related data.
