| Closing the loop on ‘near hits’ |
Employees are positively encouraged to report Near Hits by Sibelco UK, who prefer to use the phrase ‘internal concerns’. In 2007, a total of 7280 were reported - an average of 20 per operations employee (exceeding the Company’s target of 18).
Recognising that reporting is only half the story, Sibelco UK has put in place systems to ensure that every single internal concern is assessed by management; that appropriate actions are delegated and then seen through to completion.
The whole process is facilitated by the Sibelco UK “Workbench” database, which is used for many aspects of the company’s Health, Safety, Environment & Quality management system. It helps site managers to keep track of outstanding actions and is a major improvement on the historic paper action logs.
“Workbench” also provides a valuable tool for assessing trends in internal concerns reporting with automated analysis of the data. This allows managers to see which of the company’s systems are showing signs of weakness before they result in accidents, incidents or complaints.
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