HSE Operations

To enable an organisation to deal effectively with Health, Safety and Environmental issues, one of the first steps that needs to be taken is to plan for emergencies of any type. This module allows and organisation to not only plan for emergencies, but to test their plans to ensure that the outcomes are as expected. If an actual emergency occurs, the organisation can capture the outcome of implementing their plan in real life situation. This will enable the organisation to review the plan afterwards and use the data collected to improve on their plans should it be required.

When work is performed that is potentially dangerous, one method commonly used by organisations to mitigate the risk is a Work Permit. A Work Permit is typically issued to a specific person for a specific period. The worker may only undertake the dangerous work once a Work Permit has been issued. The Work Permit will also contain Special Instructions that have been designed to make sure that the work is carried out in a safe manner.

Hazardous Materials are materials that pose a higher than normal danger to Health, Safety and/or the Environment. As such, an organisation should take special care when its employees handle any type of Hazardous Materials. To do so, the organisation should know which Hazardous Materials its employees could be exposed to. Once this has been defined, the organisation should define controls and special handling instructions in order to minimise the risk associated with handling Hazardous Materials.

When dealing with Hazardous Materials, it is often not obvious why the material poses a hazard, or the material could in fact pose multiple hazards. In order to define and deal with all the dangerous aspect of a material, Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) are used. A Material Safety Data Sheet is normally issued by the Supplier or Manufacturer of the material. The MSDS contains the full detail of all the safety concerns of the material, including special handling instructions and the various consequences the material could have when being used. An organisation should have the MSDS of every Hazardous Material it uses on file.

When handling Hazardous Materials or doing dangerous work, one of the methods used to protect people is by having them use PPE (Personal Protection Equipment). This module allows a user to capture the various types of PPE the organisation uses, as well as the expected lifetime of the PPE and how often and how the PPE should be inspected.

Any Incident, Injury or Accident happening in the workplace needs to be reported, irrespective of how big or small the incident. Even Incidents that are classified as a “Near Miss”, i.e. there was no actual injury, need to be reported. Once reported, workplace Incident, Injuries and Accident need to be analyzed and the root cause determined. The next step in this process is to define and implement Corrective Actions, i.e. take actions designed to prevent this type of Incident from happening again. Once the Corrective action has been taken, an Effective Analysis is done to determine whether the Corrective Action implemented was effective or not.

When dealing with emergencies, specific people will have the skills and training required to deal with different types of emergencies effectively. It is therefore logical to keep this information on hand so that the correct people can be contacted when a specific emergency occurs.

The HSE Operations module of Effivity ensures you meet all these requirements in an effective, efficient and simple manner. The steps below list the capabilities of this module and show how to comply with the requirements relevant to this clause.

1. 1. The organisation needs to plan how it will deal with any emergency that might arise and capture this plan.
2. Once emergency plans have been defined and captured the plan needs to be tested on a regular basis. The results of these tests should be captured and if required, the plans should be improved.
3. When an actual emergency occurs, the emergency plan should be followed. The details of the emergency and the actions taken should be captured afterwards, and if required, the plans should be improved.
4. Request and generate work permit.
5. Approve and manage work permits to ensure operational control as per HSE standard.
6. Extend validity and/or cancel work permit.
7. Hazardous Materials
8. Identify, document and manage all hazardous substances in your organisation effectively through the SDS module of Effivity.
9. Generate SDS data through compilation, or upload and manage SDS provided by supplier to make them available to all stakeholders whenever required.
10. Identify PPE requirements and link them to various processes.
11. Carry out PPE inspections to ensure they are in acceptable condition.
12. Monitor and control PPEs in the Organisation.
13. Generate PPE matrix.
14. Incident, Injury, Accident Reporting
15. Emergency Response Team
16. In addition, the following parameters can be configured to enable users to capture data easily and consistently:
1. Emergency Contact Category
2. Emergency Contact List
3. Emergency Probable Consequence
4. Emergency Probable Occurrence
5. Emergency Impact Magnitude
6. Emergency Type
7. Emergency Control Type
8. Employee Category
9. Work Permit Type
10. Special Instruction
11. MSDS Type
12. Incident Category

The comprehensive capabilities of this module enable all requirements for HSE Operations to be addressed in a quick and simplified manner while ensuring 100% compliance with the ISO 14000:2015 & ISO 45001:2018 standards. Contact us at info@effivity.com for further information, or visit ISOCertification/Register.htm to subscribe to our award winning HSE operations software.