Today more than ever responsibility for the day-to-day safety of our people rests on the organization. The current rise of a pandemic has presented a unique challenge in providing a safe work environment for our people. While historically infections diseases have been always been present, for most organizations the risks have been low and Controls/Counter Measures few.
Take the situation where you have a highly contagious disease, one where you have two scenarios for transmission: person-person contact and person-surface-person contact, and both are assumed to guarantee an infection. Add that the repercussions for infection has a high likelihood of lost time incidents, and the added consequence of spreading the disease to the community outside the facility.
With these scenarios we quickly realize that most of our facilities, procedures, and work practices are not designed to properly manage this type of hazard. So how do we manage this hazard, the changes needed, and the documentation around it?
If we take the standard approach to each scenario and perform a Risk Assessment you quickly realize that their will need to be changes made all across your facility, some design changes, some procedural, and potentially changes to our basic safe work practices. The best way to systematically implement these types of changes is to utilize the Management of Change (MOC) process This is where you can capture and track:
- Your response to your Risk Assessment through Actions & Reviews
- Implementing Actions/Work Orders and Assignments
- Progress towards completion/adherence
- Permanent and Temporary changes
- All documentation associated with decisions
The benefit of utilizing the MOC process is normalizing the follow thought for making changes. Physical changes to the facility move forward like any other Facilities/Maintenance Work Order, procedural changes follow through your Operations/Engineering Revision processes, work practices follow through your HSE department’s standard roll out process. While the changes to our facility for our new normal might be significant, we can minimize the risk of failure and gaps in implementation by following our established change processes.
The MOC application is just one part of Maximo Health, Safety, and Environmental (Maximo HSE) Manager. Maximo HSE helps organizations reduce risk, maintain a safe operating environment, and increase return on assets. The applications support regulatory and compliant business processes for improvements in reliability, safety, environmental, and operational performance.
Customers are utilizing their Maximo HSE application to support safe and healthy work environments during COVID-19. Register for our upcoming webinar with IBM on June 8th: Using IBM Maximo HSE To Control The Spread of COVID-19 In The Workplace.
