People underestimate the importance of small safety issues that can add up to big issues. When a plane crashes, for example, it’s often because a dozen smaller issues weren’t addressed that ultimately added up to landing gear failure.
Preventative maintenance, combined with individual involvement in safety reporting, is quickly becoming the go-to way to protect workers. On the front lines, this means educating workers about two things:
- What it looks like when things go wrong, and
- How to collect enough data in the field so a safety officer or manager can plan maintenance for when it’s needed—not after an incident has already occurred.
Preventative maintenance programs rely on the successful collection of large amounts of data, and digital forms running on easy-to-use mobile devices are the best way to collect and process all of it.
2017 is the year to teach managers and employees what will happen if small safety issues are left unaddressed. Smart forms (digital forms used on tablets and smartphones) are a huge part of that. By collecting objective information, rather than opinion-based evaluations, it’s possible to feed data to analytics engines that can inform technicians of the potential risks they’re facing, how those risks could stack to create a bigger problem, and the fixes that are needed to remedy the risks.
A safe workplace is one that prevents accidents and protects its workers. The best way to reduce accidents—and the lost workhours that come with them – is to provide employees with the training to know when something is wrong, the tools that make it easy to identify and report problems, and the ability to facilitate the immediate sharing of that information so a safety manager can take action right away. Many companies today choose user-friendly mobile applications to avoid the delays and inefficiencies caused by paper-based safety processes. These mobile solutions have proven to be very effective, and can even be used to create preventative maintenance programs that rely on historical safety data to predict, and ultimately prevent, future accidents.
Want to see a mobile safety solution in action? Learn how Graniterock transformed a 7-day system into real-time notifications.
