Implementation of some of these systems include incident reporting and recording, with a view to capturing records of incidents and using insights to prevent similar incidents. This widespread practice has given rise to a lot of historic safety data

The need for legislative compliance is becoming more stringent and public expectations are high. We have also seen that even a single HSE incident can disrupt business operations, or even damage corporate reputation.

Separate tools and systems for managing HSE issues have evolved over the years, but now these are being integrated into the business in a structured way to provide organisations with the assurance that critical HSE risks are effectively recorded and managed.

New HSE engagement programmes and digital tools have created huge amounts of reports, all of which need to be reviewed and analysed. Most organisations have a wide range of ‘data sets’ that are rarely integrated, making it hard to create one mineable repository; permits to work, job hazard analysis, audits and inspection, observation and near miss reports.

Often the most useful information stays locked away in the free text description of the incident, where the clues lie as to direct and root causes at the heart of the incident. Data is also often not targeted correctly to detect and monitor the significant risks, along with using data science to learn and analysis risk, real-time monitoring of the key risks is also crucial.

When reporting an incident, we ask employees to categorise the type of incident. The categorisation helps us analyse the incident and run trends, but approximately 20 per cent of employees chose the 'other' category when reporting, making it difficult to understand what they’re reporting.

Implementation of some of these systems include incident reporting and recording, with a view to capturing records of incidents and using insights to prevent similar incidents in the further. This widespread practice has given rise to a lot of historic safety data.

HSE’s focus is on reducing incident rates

Meaning, currently most organisations are at a ‘Transitional maturity level’ transitioning from a traditional, paper based HSE process to a digitalised HSE date capture system. So, what can be done with this ever-growing safety data, and how can you use your existing data? Help you see beyond current practices? Can you extract greater insight so you can evolve your traditional or transitional HSE systems to a leadingedge system?

Key Challenges in HSE reporting

HSE strategy and reporting are still often very ad hoc, very manual and non-standardised. While companies are capturing / recording incidents, they often struggle to ingest and understand all their safety data, clearly see emerging risks and safety issues and often find it challenging to put mitigation strategies in place for their most common issues, to prevent them being repeated. Some of the most common challenges in HSE management include:

• Dealing with an overload of unorganised HSE data While most organisations capture vast amounts of data in their workforce safety reports, they lack understanding of the hazards their employees face daily because they simply don’t have the time or resource to investigate this data.

• Absence of integrated HSE processes and systems Companies operating in a high hazard industry often have individual HSE procedures in place but overall system is still very siloed. They are unable to see the bigger picture across the entire organisation, behaviourally, geographically and historically.

• Resource and labour-intensive Safety data analysis is often labour intensive and highly inefficient which leads to lack of hard data based, actionable insights to develop HSE strategies, prevention and mitigation activities. For this reason, 78 per cent of company data, even when available, cannot be easily analysed.

Difficulty in standardising, collecting and digitising safety data reinforces the existing practice of operating from a ‘rear view mirror’ mind-set, instead of identifying upcoming risks and evolving the existing HSE systems. There is a pressing need to distinguish between data and insight.

Most firms have lots of HSE data, but much is not insightful or used to monitor the safety barriers / control measures. Lots of safety data, but much is measuring / reporting the wrong things i.e. low risk activity.

Advancing your HSE systems to leading edge

There are many challenges businesses face in meeting the goals of HSE management, regulatory compliance and business improvement. To meet these goals, there is an increasing need to manage the risks with a human centred approach at a corporate and strategic level which entail that we gather and use employee input and feedback into the HSE analytics for risk assessment, risk trade-off decisions and risk management.

Businesses and organisations can now use the advances in digital and analytics to evolve their current HSE systems from traditional or transitional to leading edge HSE management system that combines data driven insights with human intelligence to deliver advanced and predictive HSE solutions.

Using digitised capture to enhance your HSE systems With advancements in technology and data sciences, plus an availability of big data, powerful computing and enhanced algorithms with machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), you can now leverage the power of organisational data to create a leading edge, predictive approach for your HSE strategy.

This is done by:

• Integrating data across siloes and formats: Digitisation can ensure you seamlessly integrate your siloed data-sets, across formats into a data lake, (a storage repository that holds a vast amount of raw data in its native format until it is needed) and draw additional insights from your existing organisational data. Enrich your current data with additional sensor data: Richer context allows for greater insights and predictions of risks. While reporting gives us obvious inputs, additional images and body condition monitoring helps provide actionable and often real-time insights into HSE risks and incident management.

• Apply predictive analytics: By using advanced data and digital tools you can identify and analyse the direct cause of incidents at scale to get a clearer picture of where to focus your HSE efforts – this could include visual recording and sensors to capture body condition. These insights help identifying issues that were previously unknown and can prevent safety risk incidents from occurring.

• Use Artificial Intelligence (AI): 50-80 per cent of accidents are human error driven or related, however human behaviour has traditionally been hard to measure. By using artificial intelligence, such as Natural Language Processing for text analytics, vision analytics, and vital signs analytics to monitor fatigue and heat exhaustion you can identify the hidden insights and specific causes of incidents, understand risk setting, and understand people’s behaviour, which provide previously unobtainable granularity of actionable insights in your HSE processes. This enables you to deploy efficient HSE strategies which can target the human interactions.

• A picture tells a 1000 words... New dash-boarding technologies help you identify, investigate and communicate key insights to help decision making and awareness building efforts. Add advanced analytics to the mix, and now you have a powerful tool at your fingertips to identify emerging risks and patterns.

Conclusion

HSE management is more crucial than ever, public expectations are high on business expectations, and just one HSE incident can cause major disruption and major damage corporate reputation. HSE for many companies is already on a transformational route, already digitalising a lot of their reporting and manging safety data digitally, however this is still often very siloed. By adding AI to your HSE management you can integrate your data to provide one view of the HSE across your organisation. HSE Managers can now ensure they focus their HSE efforts in the right place, reducing incident rates, and providing assurance that critical HSE risks are effectively recorded and managed.