INTRODUCING THE NEW RISK ASSESSMENT TOOL

Posted by Don Brown on Aug 21, 2017 8:00:00 AM

BasicSafe is pleased to announce the availability of a new Risk Assessment tool. The tool allows you to create detailed risk analysis for ongoing tasks, various operations, or for any project. A part of the comprehensive BasicSafe safety software suite, this module will score risks along with the effectiveness of the controls you have in place to control these risks.

This will give you the ability to prioritize your company’s next safety steps based on the highest risk and most impactful activities. The following are the Risk Assessment tool’s primary selections and features.

RISK ASSESSMENT TYPES

From basics such as process safety to specific concerns like environmental waste water, you can specify what type of risk assessment you need. With the ability to add assessments by type, you can continually tweak similar entries from one initiative to the next, instead of creating them from the ground up every time. You can also specify the sites and functional area to which each assessment applies.

CURRENT CONTROL EFFECTIVENESS (CCE)

The CCE ranks the effectiveness of the controls you currently have in place for a specific risk. CCE selection is embedded within each risk type, allowing you to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your controls in combination and isolation.

COMMON RISKS

Common risks are those which may be evaluated in one or more of your risk assessment types, such as “act of nature” or “chemical.” Each common risk may have associated hazards, initiating events or both. For instance, you might specify “burn” and “spill” as initiating events for your chemical common risk.

EXPOSURE, LIKELIHOOD OF ENFORCEMENT PROBABILITIES

An accurate risk score requires a measure of the likelihood of the risk, as well as its severity, frequency and likelihood of regulatory enforcement. The Exposure, Likelihood and Enforcement Probabilities menu within each risk assessment type allows you to set those parameters. Each probability can be further defined with its own parameters, as well.

For instance, your “safety” risk assessment type might include a likelihood measure of “number of people exposed to a hazard at a given time.” That probably itself might be broken down into several options, such as “one person,” “two people,” “three to five people” and “more than five people,” to which you would assign increasingly high probability scores.

PROCESS DEPARTMENTS

Risk assessments are only useful in context, and you’ll need to capture the departments in which your risks exist. Within each risk assessment type, you can add process departments – Field Operations, for example – as well as functional divisions for each department, such as Excavation, Growing Operations and Underground Operations and Testing.

SEVERITY OF CONSEQUENCES

A risk assessment score also requires the severity or possible consequences of an incident. The Severity of Consequences menu allows you to add multiple “severities” for each risk assessment type, each with its own score. For instance, your safety risk assessment might include increasingly high-scoring severities of “requiring first-aid,” “resulting in work restrictions” and “most likely resulting in a fatality.”

SPECIFIC AND TARGETED CONTROLS

CCE gauges the effectiveness of your controls, but during any given run with the Risk Assessment Tool, you’ll need to document which controls were in place at that time. The module includes common control types, such as “Administrative Controls” and “Engineering Controls,” and you can create more detailed control categories within those types to increase your ability to track.

RISK ASSESSMENT COMPLETION AND DATA USAGE

Once all of your components are in place, completing a risk assessment is simple. You’ll select your risk assessment type, facilitators and department, followed by the applicable parameters within each of the entities you created: controls, risks, probabilities and severities.

Your overall risk assessment scores is calculated based on the individual scores you assigned to the relevant parameters. The module will produce an inherent risk score, which refers to the risk present without any controls in place, as well as a residual risk score, which represents the risk after your controls are considered. The comparison between these scores will also give you your CCE – the critical measure for determining the efficacy of your safety program.

DATA SORTING AND REPORTING

Finally, the Risk Assessment module records every assessment run, and your runs can be sorted according to assessment type, date, site locations, risk type and a variety of other criteria. You can print specific risk assessments in detail, or generate a log of multiple assessments in PDF format.