Canadian Occupational Safety

APRIL/MAY 2017 29 Available Risk-Free for 30 Days Order online: www.carswell.com Call Toll-Free: 1-800-387-5164 In Toronto: 416-609-3800 Has your workplace met all requirements under the new Bill 132? New Edition Pocket Ontario OH&S Act & Regulations 2017 – Consolidated Edition © 2017 Thomson Reuters Canada Limited 00243CP-A86353-CM Your peers rely on this best-selling pocket resource for invaluable guidance on workplace safety law. From preparing job hazard analyses and creating safety training programs to developing anti-harassment policies and performing violence risk assessments – the new 2017 edition of this best-selling resource will help your organization meet all your OHSA obligations, including the new requirements under Bill 132. To see what's new, go to www.carswell.com/pocket-ohs Order # 987844-65201 $23.95 Softcover approx. 1080 pages March 2017 978-0-7798-7844-4 Also available in French. Call for details. Also available Large format edition with tabs Order # 987846-65201 $23.95 Softcover approx. 780 pages March 2017 978-0-7798-7846-8 eBook available for web browser or download to your desktop, laptop, iPad or Android tablet.* Learn more at carswell.com/proview *eBook not available to trade bookstores, third-party distributors, academic institutions, and students. Order # 987844-65201 Also available Shipping and handling are extra. Price(s) subject to change without notice and subject to applicable taxes cloud-based software designed to keep track of compliance and train- ing, something a lot of companies find difficult, says Allan Nolan, president. "There are so many different scenar- ios. You could have an individual who took the training yesterday and it's good for three years. Someone else is coming due next month. It can spiral out of control if you don't have the proper management system, especially when you have lots of employees," he says. Nolan says his system is designed to be "a la carte": there are differ- ent features and services and thus a wide price range. Equipment mainte- nance records can be input and easily accessed. A company can also upload employee performance reviews, resu- més, driving certificates and training certificates from past jobs as well as from the current job. "From a tracking standpoint, there's no stone unturned. You can look at all your employees, equipment, safety inspection, audits and certification expiry dates," he says. "We're finding, for the HR role, this saves them a huge amount of time. Instead of relying so much on manpower, they can auto- mate a lot of these tasks." Safety First Training's system includes a large library of WHMIS and other standard safety courses embedded in the safety management program that workers can take any time. "They can take a three-hour course online at home, which saves the employer lost productivity time for a training class. So there could be some cost savings and more flexibility for the employer." Nolan says some training is still best done the old-fashioned way; for example, when workers are being trained on machinery, such as aerial or scissor lifts. "Whenever a hands-on approach is needed, we want to be at the employ- er's place of business, where we can work with their employees on their equipment, so we can see a typical day and flag safety issues and help them become safer in their own workplace." Toronto-based Medgate, which sells mainly to large, multi-national companies, focuses on three areas, says David Poole, product marketing manager. One is risk management. The safety manager conducts job hazard analyses using built-in audit and inspection templates. "You can go around the site with a laptop, an iPad or even cellphone and complete the questionnaires associated with the template. When you hit submit, it will all go to one centralized place," he says. "Once you've gathered the information, you can plot out the various risks you've identified on a matrix. That will allow you to prioritize where you are going to go from there. So, if you have a situation that's both high likelihood and severity of risk, that would be a great place to start." This function gives companies with many distant sites the ability to send the information into a central EHS manager, where the software analyses the data. The second area is compliance: the SMS helps safety managers keep track of current legislation and regulation relevant to each site's jurisdiction, Poole says. The SMS is integrated with a database, created by four EHS regu- lation data service companies that is constantly updated to reflect changes in OHS regulation. Companies that subscribe to one of those services can get a list of all the regulation that applies to each of their work sites. "You can track that into a compli- ance calendar and make sure all the tasks associated with those pieces of regulation become part of your day- to-day operations. You've assigned someone to ensure compliance in a particular area. The person who's assigned gets automated reminders: 'Go out and do this,'" he says. Thirdly, the SMS tracks programs aimed at improving safety across an organization. The incident manage- ment module provides a way to track an incident — from collecting details of the investigation to determining the root cause and putting in place some corrective action, Poole says. "If your recourse is something to do with a process, rather than just 'machine was faulty' or 'human error,' then you change the process as well, so that it rolls out across your opera- tions. You can learn from one incident something that may be applicable to a wide variety of situations." Through the SMS, employees can also log in quickly and document a near miss or record a suggestion they have to improve safety. "It's an easy and powerful way to make employees think more about safety. It's a good way to drive safety culture, and it allows you to be proac- tive," Poole says. People are often focused on safety culture, he adds, but find it is a vague goal and difficult to measure. They need data to be able to know whether measures they've introduced to improve safety are working. SMS helps them do this by providing informa- tion on leading indicators, measures put in place to prevent and control future incidents. "As people build their sophistica- tion with software systems, they are more interested in tracking leading indicators. They get a richer view of the risk landscape if they are able to build in more and more of these risk indicators," he says. Calgar y-based SafetyTek special- izes in replacing paper work with digital safety forms, such as a pre-job hazard analyses, says Ryan Quiring, president and CEO. The cloud-based file system stores PDF versions of the forms and holds any other historical documentation the safety profes- sional might need. Safety manuals, safety data sheets, OHS legislation booklets and work procedures can be uploaded to the system. The SMS tracks key safety informa- tion, such as whether unsafe work situations have been corrected, as well as worker compliance and incidents to determine trends. It has a cloud-based training matrix, which flags expiry dates and training gaps. In addition to time and money, Quiring says, SMS can help a company improve safety, citing a client whose workers' compensation board claims had decreased by 88 per cent. "The system itself doesn't do that. What it does is give the safety co-ordi- nator time so they can focus on 'What do I need to do today?' They're not sit- ting behind a desk with stacks of paper trying to input the data into a report- ing tool or filing cabinet. Because the system manages all that automatically, it becomes a simple retrieval process." Apart from note-taking, Quiring cannot point to any safety manage- ment task that is still better done using paper and pen. "What use is a piece of paper if you read it once and file it away? If you want to see a trend, how do you do that on a piece of paper? You can't. If I am a roofing company and I want to see how many slips, trips and falls there were during the last six months and I want to correlate that trend to weather, I can do that with a digital system. On paper, just the task of grab- bing that data is daunting," he says. Linda Johnson is a freelance journalist based in Toronto. She can be reached at lindajohnson@sympatico.ca.

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