Creating Preventative Actions With Incident Management Software

The key objective of incident management system is to allow employees to report workplace incidents. However, sophisticated incident management software goes one step further. By collecting data over time and translating it into meaningful insights, advanced incident management software empowers enterprises to mitigate their risks by spotting trends before they become incidents.

Organisations can identify areas of the business that are prone to risk and then develop and put in place the preventative measures to minimise those risks. This means that organisations can improve their overall safety and foster a proactive and trusting safety culture within teams.

Elumina provides such a solution, which collects and leverages data to deliver risk management insights. For urgent matters, Elumina makes it easy for their users to quickly log trends and incidents, so that notifications can be passed up the chain of command in real time.

Elumina also has detailed reporting capabilities to document any incident. Users can track the reasons and sub-reasons as to why an incident or near miss has occurred. Data analysis can then reveal opportunities to improve safety in various areas of the business, by highlighting both trends and anomalies. Management can draw insights from the data and build awareness of the most hazardous areas of the business. This ultimately empowers management to develop and implement corrective and preventative actions to improve safety and streamline procedures.

The fundamental process underpinning how incident management software can be used to develop corrective and preventative actions is:

  1. Create and categorise detailed logs for all hazards, near misses and incidents.
  2. As patterns emerge over time, identify areas of the business to improve.
  3. Rate the level of different risks and identify corrective actions.
  4. Develop and implement corrective and preventative controls.
  5. Monitor the reoccurrence of incidents to reasonably determine if the issue has been resolved.

As part of the second step in the process, once areas of concern in the business have been identified, a root cause analysis can be launched. This involves asking ‘why’ questions to delve into the reasons why an incident is occurring. Whether the root cause is a behavioural or mechanical problem, key learning points and associated considerations can all be logged within the system.

The final step in optimising policies and procedures to minimise risk is to develop corrective and preventative actions in response to these insights. Corrective actions address issues that have already happened whereas preventative actions address the potential for hazards and incidents to arise in the future.

A few examples of preventative actions that could be implemented following a root cause analysis include:

  • SWMS review and analysis
  • Documentation for procedures
  • Clear policies
  • Work instructions
  • Formal and informal training structures
  • Reviews and audits

Elumina allows users to create a number user-defined fields. The customisable nature of the system ensures that enterprises across industries with different organisational structures can tailor the system to meet their specific needs. The system can also be designed to put in place the policies and procedures that ensure you comply with all relevant regulations.