17/09/2020 / By Laura Stupple / Contractor Management • OHS Software/ 0 Comments

How essential are QR codes to visitor management?

QR codes have had a new lease of life in 2020, as many businesses have had to monitor and record every visitor due to COVID-19. QR codes have been essential in managing the people that we allow on our premises throughout 2020, but many businesses were also using them prior to COVID in order to carry out effective visitor management.

QR codes can be exceptionally helpful in managing visitors and contractors onto a site, and help to manage the flow of traffic that can sometimes become tricky for one person to manage. Take a look at how QR codes are proving themselves essential to visitor management in 2020.

What Are QR Codes?

A QR code can be defined as “a machine-readable code consisting of an array of black and white squares, typically used for storing URLs or other information for reading by the camera on a smartphone”.

They are a relatively new technology that is essentially a machine-readable label that can be scanned and holds information about the thing that it corresponds to. It is a great way to communicate and hold information in a tiny label.

Why Were QR Codes Created?

QR codes originated in 1994 in Japan, and were originally created to work within the automotive industry. The word QR code is short for Quick Response – and this is why QR codes were created – to be able to respond quickly in carrying information from one device to another.

They were created to aid the manufacturing process when building cars, as QR codes enabled high speed component tracking. Nowadays, they are still used in a similar manner in order to share information, however their use has been transferred across many industries.

How Do QR Codes Help With Visitor Management?

QR are now essential to visitor management for an array of reasons. These can be defined as:

They Make The Sign In Process Seamless

The issue with traditional visitor management with a pen and paper isn’t that it doesn’t work – it does when it’s completed correctly. However, one of the main issues with paper-based systems is that they rely on human brain power to ensure that the sign in is completed and then stored.

QR codes take stress out of the sign in process and make it easy for visitors to sign in as soon as they get on site. In a post-COVID world, pretty much everyone is ready to sign in wherever they go, and when people see a QR code they are already familiar with the QR code process.

They Allow People To Self Check In

Your employees will benefit from allowing people to self check in and not having to monitor visitors coming in and out themselves. The QR code process means that a visitor is able to fill in the contact form themselves, which frees up your staff’s time.

They Move Visitor Details Online

There is nothing worse than having a paper based system and losing track of visitor details. This is especially true in the time of COVID, when it is a legal requirement to keep visitor data safe. With QR codes, the information is stored and saved digitally so that you never have to worry about misplacing your visitor information.

They Can Be Used For A Contactless Sign In

QR codes are very helpful for ensuring a safe visitor sign in from a social distancing point of view. With QR codes, the visitor needn’t come into contact with a staff member and can fill in their details easily. This means your team has one less thing to worry about when managing a project.

They Enable Pre-screening Questions

QR codes allow you to add pre-screening questions when someone leaves their details. This means that all information is stored digitally instead of manually and doesn’t rely on someone having to ask the awkward questions of how well someone has been feeling. The person simply fills it in on their phone without having to share personal information.

Are you looking to learn more about QR codes for visitor management? Discover the Beakon solution to visitor management that can transform how you sign visitors in.

01/09/2020 / By Laura Stupple / Task Management Software/ 0 Comments

Who Is Task Management Software For?

Task management is so much more than a to-do list. In fact, effective task management can totally change how you run your business and save you hours of time which can then be invested into other things.

Old school paper-based systems of task management have proven themselves to be pretty redundant in the modern, digital world. This is why companies are now evolving to task management software that helps them manage projects in one place.

In this article we’ll be looking at who task management is for and why it can be so beneficial for your business. Take a look to learn more about the software and decide whether it’s right for your business.

Who Does Task Management Software Benefit?

Task management is the next step up for any professional looking to streamline their business processes and optimise their time. Task management can benefit almost anyone, however often growing businesses and those who already have a couple of employees are best placed to invest in task management software.

For sole traders and independent consultants, often calendars and online to do lists can be enough. However, as soon as your business grows and you start to work with other people, task management becomes essential.

Task Management is an essential within business, however it’s surprising how many larger businesses still use archaic paper-based systems that are holding them back. So many businesses could benefit from better managing their workflows, and software makes that process a lot easier.

What Kind Of Industries Is Task Management Software For?

Task management can work for almost any industry. If you have tasks to be completed within teams, task management software exists to help you get it done. The kinds of industries that benefit from task management software include:

Construction
Product management
Manufacturing
Engineering
IT
Healthcare
Energy
Defense
Finance
Architecture
Transport

Although these are the industries where task management is probably most prevalent, many other industries are now becoming wise to the amazing benefits of task management software.

What Does Task Management Help With?

Task Management software gives your business the flexible tools to allocate tasks, manage projects and keep projects on track. Beakon’s Task Management software allows you to:

Delegate tasks between team members to make business operations easier
Have a tracking process that you can always refer back to
Have a full project overview. You can set due dates and send instructions before you’ve even left the meeting room
Create customisable workflows that work for your business
Utilise a fully responsive design so that your task management system will work on all devices
Make the most of cloud-based storage so your files and documents are accessible wherever you are, whenever you need them
Use international integration to work across multiple time zones, languages and currencies with ease
Manage remote teams with live updates
Create more opportunities to check in with your team and track their progress

Where Could Task Management Software Take Your Business?

Many of our clients have seen their business thrive with task management software, and yours could be next.

If you’d like to discuss the task management options that we have available, get in touch today.

01/09/2020 / By Laura Stupple / Risk assessment software • Risk Management • Risk Management Software/ 0 Comments

5 ways to reduce the risk of an incident on your site

If you manage a construction site, you’ll know that managing risk is a huge part of any project. However, this can be easier said than done when there are plenty of moving parts.

Government research shows that in 2019, 182 Australian workers were fatally injured while working, compared with 144 workers in 2018. Amongst the industries that had the most injuries and fatalities were Transport, Agriculture and – you guessed it – construction.

If you manage a construction site, or look after any aspect of workplace safety for your organisation, it’s always useful to brush up on your incident and risk management skills. To help, we’re running through the top 5 ways to reduce the risk of an incident on your site.

Educate Your People On Incident Risk

Risk increases when employees don’t understand the dangers of their environment, and often the only way to bridge that knowledge gap is by educating them yourself. Realistically, health and safety is one of the last things on the average contract workers mind, but it’s so important. One of the first steps in reducing the risk of an incident on your site is educating your people.

Often an effective learning management system or LMS can be very helpful in keeping track of the modules that people have completed and having a record in one place. Training people on health and safety best practices will help to reduce the risk of an incident on your watch.

Perform Regular Inspections

Having a handle on the level of risk is important, and regular inspections to see how your risk level is holding up is essential. Without constantly checking in and going over the hazards that are present on your site, new risks can crop up and cause issues.

Having a risk register that you can refer back to is very important and helps to remind everyone of incidents that have occured in the past and the potential weak spots where an incident may occur in the future.

Take A Risk Management Approach

On many sites, the policy is just ‘wait until something happens and then enforce safety measures’, however often that’s when incidents occur. Taking a risk management approach may seem boring or over the top, but having this attitude will help you reduce the risk of incidents on your site.

A risk management approach means that you actively seek out the risks and measure the likelihood of an incident occurring so that you can prevent them in the first place. This risk management attitude should have a trickle down effect from the top project managers and stakeholders to the day to day construction workers.

Once You Have Identified Risks, Make A Plan

Once you have identified the risks of an incident on your site, make a plan of attack to ensure that they don’t occur. This safety plan should be well documented and readily available for everyone to access.

A list of preventative measures should be implemented, and you may need to check in with your teams weekly or even daily to make sure that everyone is on top of these risks and doing everything they can to reduce the risk of an incident on your site.

Ensure That Your Tools And Protective Gear Are Up To Scratch

Aside from human error and negligence, one of the main causes of incidents on sites is when there is an error with equipment or protective gear. It is important that your business has an allocated individual to check the safety of tools and protective gear to keep your people safe.

Task Management software can help to ensure that everyone is on top of these tasks and keeps a record of when checks have been carried out.

For more information on how to reduce the risk of an incident on your site, head over to our contact page and get in touch.

26/08/2020 / By Laura Stupple / Learning Management Software • Safety Management Software/ 0 Comments

How Big Does Your Business Need To Be To Invest In Safety And Compliance Software?

Are you thinking about investing in safety and compliance software, but you’re worried that you’re too small to invest heavily in your operations? If that’s your thought process, think again.

There’s no perfect company size when it comes to when you should invest in safety and compliance software, since investing early will make it easier for you to scale up in a compliant manner when the time is right. That being said, you also need to ensure that you’re in the right position to utilise the software to its full capacity, which is what we’re running through in this article.

We’re taking a look at the best size a business should be to utilise safety and compliance software, to help you figure out if it’s time to take the leap and invest in compliance software.

Should your company be thinking about safety and compliance?

Short answer, yes. Every company is required to engage lawfully when it comes to health and safety, so whether you’re a massive multi-million dollar company, or a small enterprise, you need to think about the health and safety or your people and your products.

That said, if you’re a smaller company with fewer employees and smaller business operations, often managing health and safety can be easier. This is where the debate around how big your business needs to be to invest in compliance software comes in.

What is compliance software?

Compliance software can cover everything from risk management to incident management and many other software services in between. Compliance software is there to help you abide by the law and keep your people and your company safe as you operate day to day.

Compliance software helps you stay on top of your duties as a business, as well as keep a record of events. Compliance software helps you create ‘repeatable and reliable’ documents that can be used throughout the business and streamlined onto one singular easy-to-use platform.

Instead of using paper-based systems that can cause all kinds of problems, safety and compliance software manages the complex administration of compliance in order to embed your health and safety framework and rules with legislative requirements to ensure that your business is protected.

How big does your business need to be to use compliance software?

We work with huge businesses from Coca-Cola Amatil to DHL, all the way down to smaller businesses who run construction sites and need assistance with remaining safe and compliant.

You don’t have to be a big business to start reaping the rewards of safety and compliance software. In fact, starting the process when you have less going on and less paperwork to manage can sometimes be better.

Getting into good habits and forming a data record that stretches back and is all located in one place, means that as your business grows you needn’t worry about the boring (but crucial!) aspects of business like safety and compliance.

Plus, investing in quality software isn’t just about abiding by the law. There is a good chance that your business could benefit financially from reduced risk and increased revenue that using compliance software often brings. In streamlining your processes you open up employee time and incentivise good practice – all habits that will be very helpful as you grow.

Want to learn more about compliance and safety software?

Is your business ready to try safety and compliance software? The Beakon solution is an interconnected software system that has over 50 compliance, risk and safety modules.

Get in touch today to learn more about how we operate, and how we could help your business with safety and compliance!

20/08/2020 / By Laura Stupple / Contractor Management Software • Task Management Software/ 0 Comments

What Are Workflows?

What are workflows and why do they work?

As you probably know by now, Beakon specialises in task management software and implementing workflows in businesses. We help you create a workflow that suits your business and allows work to move around with ease.

Our aims are always to give your business the flexible tools to allocate tasks and manage progress to keep projects on track. Over our time working in consultation with businesses, we have learnt a lot about how workflows can boost business and encourage growth, so we wanted to share why workflows are so valuable.

Discover more about workflows and why they work in this handy article…

What Is A Workflow?

A workflow simply refers to how work gets done within an organisation. It needn’t be a crazy process and can simply refer to the passing of work through the business to see the project from fruition to completion.

In essence, a workflow guides the work from point to point, ensuring that everyone who needs to be involved in the signing off and execution is on the same page. In the past, workflows would be paper based, however more recently they have become digital.

Why do workflows work?

Whatever business you run, or whatever you do for work, there will be a workflow in place. Whether it is running effectively is another story, but in order for a project to be completed there almost always needs to be a workflow.

Workflows work by passing tasks from one person to another, or one team to another to ensure that nothing is missed along the way. Workflows can remind us to complete tasks, minimise room for error and help managers make quick decisions and allocations.

Workflows work because they help you to streamline tasks and get a top level view of your business. When workflows are completed, everyone is on the same page with how the task will be completed and this increases transparency.

How Can We Create Better Workflows In Business?

Analyse What You Have

One of the first steps we need to consider when we look at workflows in business is how the current workflow is performing. We need to consider how many steps there are, where there are any blocks and what is and isn’t working with the workflow system.

Prioritise Your Work

Creating a better workflow means allocating tasks and deadlines based on how much of a priority they are. Figuring out which tasks are more important will help you create tasks and set due dates.

Minimise The Paperwork

The best way to keep everyone on track and on schedule is to minimise the amount of paperwork we have. By using cloud-based storage we can make files accessible to anyone, no matter where they are and make the signing off and passing on of work easier.

Allocate Tasks ASAP

Allocating and actioning tasks as soon as decisions are made is the best way to keep things moving within a workflow. Create tasks, assign tasks, set due dates, and task requirements or instructions before you’ve left the meeting room.

Use Software That Helps You

Having the flexible task management software that helps you manage tasks effectively can be a game changer for your business. Get in touch to learn more about how workflows can work for your business.

30/07/2020 / By Laura Stupple / Safety Management/ 0 Comments

Top 5 things people forget when running a project

So, you’ve just been handed a project that you’re overseeing from fruition to completion – congrats! Managing a project is a really exciting step and means that you must be doing something right!

However, as exciting and interesting managing a project is, it’s important to take the responsibility seriously and understand what is involved. There are some things that we all think of when we think of ‘managing a project’, like managing stakeholder interests, building and working to timelines, and managing an array of people to meet the end goal.

These are all crucial parts of the puzzle, however there are also some classic elements of project management that people forget about. Often, these tasks sneak in at the last minute and create a sense of overwhelm that can be avoided altogether if people knew what to look for at the start.

To help you smash your project, we’re compiling a short list of the things people often forget about when running a project. Take a look…

1. Permits to work

This is crucial to allowing work to commence, however often people leave it to the last minute or forget about it altogether. Once you’ve found the right employees or contractors, it’s essential that you give them a permit to work that officially and formally notices their skills.

Permit to work is going to ensure that you have the right people on the job, that are able to carry out the work safely. Not only does this reduce risk, it also means that your business will be closer to achieving compliance.

2. Communication channels

When managing a project, there will be a lot of people that you need to communicate with at one time. This means that you will need to have the right infrastructure in place to do that. Before the project starts, think about how you will communicate with your teams and ensure that everyone is comfortable with how they will work.

Everything from visitor management to the project timelines will need to be shared and communicated, so setting up clear channels of communication prior to the commencement date will set you up for success.

3. Risk assessment

Don’t forget to assess the risk before you start and then continuously manage it as the project goes on. Risk assessment is one of those things that people tend to forget about until they realise that they need it – by which point it is often too late as an incident has already occurred.

Get to grips with some risk assessment tools that will help you proactively manage risk and reduce incidents as much as possible.

4. Monitoring and control

When running a project it can be easy to forget to monitor and control any changes to the original plan. This is where clear communication comes in, and it is important that you have alerted everyone to the fact that changes need to be tracked and documented so that everyone is on the same page.

Good monitoring and control practices will help to manage everything from risk, quality, time and cost and will keep you on track with the project life cycle.

5. Documentation

When things get heated and pressured, sometimes the documentation can be the last thing on your mind. However, effective documentation is crucial to running any project and will cover your back in the event of anything going wrong.

Despite the importance of clear and accurate documentation, often project managers forget to keep on top of it. This is often because companies still work with paper based systems that require hours of labour to complete. They then need to be passed around to several people to sign off and filed (usually in a quick paced environment where things can get lost).

To reduce the likelihood of documentation getting lost or mis-managed, it’s a great idea to look into easy-to-use documentation software that will make managing your project a breeze. Beakon specialises in these kinds of documentation aids that cover everything from risk management, to visitor management, to contractor management and ensure that all of your most important documents are online.

To learn more, head over to our contact us page and drop us a line. We’re always keen to discuss your project management needs, no matter what industry you work in!

The dangers of incomplete permits to work

30/07/2020 / By Laura Stupple / Learning Management Software/ 0 Comments

Permits To Work In Construction

If you work on a construction site, no matter where you are in the world, you are likely to need a permit to work. This is because construction is a high risk industry, with many danger challenges that can mean that your people and the public are at risk.

In order to minimise that risk and ensure that your business is working in a compliant manner, a permit to work can be essential. They help to ensure that the right people are working on site, by detailing what is required of the role and what training is necessary.

Without a permit to work system, your business risks putting the wrong people on site. This is not only costly and ineffective, but also means that your site will be at higher risk of incidents.

We’re taking a look at why a permit to work is so crucial in construction, and how to manage them.

Why are permits to work essential in construction?

A permit to work is an essential in any industry or business that poses high risks, and construction sites often fall into that category. This is because construction sites are full of hazards that can be a risk to your people and the public. Some of the main concerns that need to be taken into account, and which may require a permit to work are:

Working at height.
Moving objects.
Slips, trips, and falls.
Noise.
Hand arm vibration syndrome.
Material and manual handling.
Collapsing trenches.
Asbestos.
Electricity.
Airborne fibres and materials.

Permit to Work systems are crucial to help manage these high risk elements of working in construction to ensure that work is able to continue to go on safely. Permits to work are usually supported by a Job Safety Analysis (JSA) process and a range of related procedures for high risk activities.

How are permits to work issued in construction?

To issue a permit to work, you need to be trained in work safety and hazards and need to be able to prove that. This may require certification and constant training updates to ensure that people in your organisation are assessing others are up to scratch.

Once your organisation has confirmed who is eligible to issue a permit, the person nominated to issue a permit to work informs the head contractor and details the tasks to be carried out and the location of the work. This is then assessed against each individual’s skills and qualifications to ensure that the right people are allocated to each job. After these are aligned and confirmed to match up, a permit to work will be issued to confirm that the person is able to do the job at hand.

How can you manage work permits in construction?

Despite the importance of an up to date and legitimate permit to work in construction, often people leave them to the last minute and don’t give them as much attention as they should. Equally, many people still use paper-based systems, which means that things can easily get lost. Not only that, but motivation is often low for people to fill out forms by hand and physically hand them over to someone.

For those reasons quickly detailed above, paper based systems are now being replaced by digital permits to work systems that allow versatile permit layouts, workflows and standards guaranteeing that mean that your company can get a full view of the permits being issued throughout the business.

Managing permits to work in construction can be done via an online system that allows you to:

Issue Permits to Work.
See Permit approvals.
Audit-friendly records for permit history and access history.
Work on all devices, including smartphones and tablets.

Managing permits to work in construction

Are you looking to manage your permits to work in a more effective way? Discover why a more effective permit to work solution is required for any construction site in our handy article.

Alternatively, you can get in touch today to start a free trial and see how much easier life is with a seamless permit to work solution that takes the hassle out of issuing work permits in construction.

07/07/2020 / By Laura Stupple / Learning Management Software/ 0 Comments

Permit To Work FAQ

One of the topics that we always get asked questions about is the permit to work software and how it works. Beyond just the software, we spend a lot of time talking to clients about how they can streamline their whole permit process, from bringing someone on and interviewing them to getting them safely working on site.

We’re always looking to help our clients get the answers they need fast, so we’ve put together a quick question and answer article to run through permit to work FAQ.

Take a look…

Q: What is the meaning of a permit to work?

A: Depending on the sector and type of work, you may need to get your employees or contractors a permit to work. This permit is a written, official document that establishes whether the person is eligible to do the job and ensures that they can do it safely.

The goal of a permit to work is to quickly and safely establish who is allowed on site and ensures that your business is compliant whilst working. They run through the risks and regulations on site in full transparency, so that a worker is able to sign off on their knowledge before starting work, and in this sense serve to communicate and control the work environment.

Q: When is a permit to work used?

A: A permit to work is used for a specific location or project to run through exactly what risks and knowledge will apply to that site. As each site is different, it is important that the permit to work is localised to the exact site. They will usually be concerning specific work that might need certain qualifications in order to be completed safely.

Q: Why do we need a permit to work?

A: The reason a permit to work is issued is to prevent incidents and increase safety on site. When working on big projects it can be hard to ensure that everyone is compliant at all times, and this helps to streamline that process and get it down in writing before anyone steps foot on site. It is an essential part of running your business safely and protects both your business and your people from danger.

Q: What is the importance of a permit to work system?

A: Permit to work software plays an essential role in ensuring the safe execution of hazardous work activities. They help to alleviate the stress of the process and ensure that the hours of filling forms, writing tags and transporting papers is condensed.

Having a solid system in place reduces risk and the chances of accidents occurring, which in turn keeps frontline workers both safe and efficient. Plus, it saves your business money and ensures that productivity is boosted.

Q: Why do people use an electronic software?

A: Using an electronic permit to work software means that the process is easily customisable for your business and takes into account any intricate project or industry risks.

Permits that are issued electronically are easily traceable and can be requested and sent between contractors and employees quickly and easily. This reduces the amount of admin and allows people to get on with their jobs more efficiently.

Users find that they can quickly identify and rectify any conflicting work activities and contact the relevant people to fix any issues with the push of a button.

Q: What kinds of projects require permits to work?

A: Wherever there is a risk to safety, there should be a permit to work in place. This could mean permits to work for working at height, working with restricted access, hot works, roof access and contamination.

Any kind of health risk should be reviewed by a professional, however it is always safer to assume that you do need a permit to work to ensure that you remain compliant and put employee and contractor safety first. The government website offers advice on health and safety at work and how to manage it effectively.

Q: Do contractors need a permit to work?

A: Absolutely. In fact, often a permit is more essential for contractors as their movements can be harder to manage. When working with contractors, it’s essential that you are all on the same page and have a clear record of where they have been working and what they can do. With a digital system this is easy to trace.

Thinking about getting a permit to work software installed? Talk to us about the benefits of an online system for issuing permits to work – you’ll be surprised how beneficial they can be!

03/07/2020 / By Laura Stupple / Risk Management/ 0 Comments

How To Create A Risk Management Plan For Your Project

When you’re managing a project, having an effective risk management plan in place is essential. Not only will an effective plan protect your people from unnecessary risk, it will ensure that you remain compliant and are doing your best to keep your workplace safe.

In emergencies, a risk management plan can stop things escalating and getting out of hand, as well as putting your mind at ease prior to an incident occurring. Take a look at how to create a risk management plan for your project in our handy article.

What Risks Could Take Place?

The first stage of any risk management plan is assessing what could actually happen. Once you’re more aware of the risks that are present, you can start to plan and prepare for them. Sometimes this process takes thought, as risks can be quite hidden. However, ensuring that you know what series of events could be putting your business at risk is a sure fire way to minimise them.

To uncover the risks that your business faces, there are some questions you need to ask yourself, and your staff. These are:

What might happen in this environment?

The environment is often one of the most common areas of risk. Take into account what your people have to do within the work environment and identify any dangerous areas where risk could be heightened.

Who would be at risk?

If something were to happen, who could be at risk and how are they protected at present? Are they aware of the risks that they face at work? Could more be done to educate your people on the risks within the environment?

What would the impact be if the worst case scenario did happen

If something terrible did happen, it’s important to work out what the worst case scenario would be and how you would manage it if it did happen. Impact is an important indicator of how urgently you need to manage that risk.

What is the probability of this risk happening?

Within your project, it is good to predict the probability of the risk and whether the likelihood of it happening is imminent. If so, you’ll need to take immediate action, however in most cases the risks are not imminent and therefore you can create a risk management plan to prepare ahead of time.

Mitigation: how can you mitigate the risk?

There will be things that you can do to mitigate the risk to your people and your business. You may assess whether you have adequate training, software and staff to manage risks within your business.

Contingency: can you reduce the impact?

If you can’t mitigate the risk, you may be able to reduce the impact. There will be a level of risk that you simply can’t avoid, however you should be able to minimise the impact if that risk were to happen.

Discover The Assumed Risks And Exposure

Exposure needs to be considered within the risk management plan – that is, the amount of risk you can’t avoid. This can also be described as threat, liability or severity.

By figuring out the assumed risk you can work out the costs vs costs savings of implementing certain risk solutions. Assumed Risk is reduced to a dollar value which is then used to calculate the profitability of the end product.

This is often a simple cost vs. benefits formula. You might use these elements to determine if the risk of implementing the change is higher or lower than the risk of not implementing the change.

Create A Risk Management Plan In 10 Steps

Once you have those risks assessed, it’s time to get on top of the risk management plan for your project. Here’s how.

Step One: Define The Project

Define the project, your objectives, and the risks that come with each objective. You should measure your risk in terms of impact and mark the risk and impact in terms of high medium and low.

Step Two: Ask People What Risks They Face

If you’re creating a risk management plan, it’s likely that you’re not on the ground facing the risks day to day. In order to cover all bases, you will need to collaborate with the people who face the risks. Ask people who are familiar with the project what the risks are and how they feel risks could be mitigated.

Step Three: Look At The Consequences

With a risk management plan, the idea is to always plan ahead. What would happen if the risks materialised? Planning this out will ensure that when/if something does happen, you will have a plan in place and be aware of the consequences and the potential spiral effects.

Step Four: Assign Probability Of Risk

Which risks are most likely to come true? For each risk element on your list, determine if the likelihood of it actually materialising is High, Medium or Low.

Step Five: Assign Impact

In general, assign Impact as High, Medium or Low based on some pre-established guidelines.

Step Six: Determine Risk For The Element

Often, a table is used for this. If you have used the Low, Medium and High values for Probability and Impact, the top table is most useful. If you have used numeric values, you will need to consider a bit more complex rating system similar to the second table here. It is important to note that there is no universal formula for combining Probability and Impact; that will vary between people and projects.

Step Seven: Rank The Risks

List all the elements you have identified from the highest risk to the lowest risk and compute a total risk.

Step Eight: Develop Mitigation Strategies

Develop mitigation strategies that reduce the possibility that a risk will materialise.

Step Nine: Develop Contingency Plans

Contingency is designed to reduce the impact if a risk does materialise. Again, you will usually only develop contingencies for High and Medium elements.

Step Ten: Analyse The Effectiveness Of Strategies

How much have you reduced the Probability and Impact? Evaluate your Contingency and Mitigation strategies and reassign Effective Ratings to your risks.

An Effective Risk Management Plan

This is a very simplified version of the process that you might go through to create a risk management plan for your project, however it should help to point you in the right direction.

For more information, you can take a look at our risk management solutions that help you assess and register risk.

25/06/2020 / By Laura Stupple / Incident Management/ 0 Comments

The Importance Of Incident Reporting System

When we talk about incident reporting, we often think about the ways that we can react after an incident has occurred at work. Whilst the initial response is important, there are also other elements that need to be considered, beyond just the immediate actions that need to be taken.

This article will look at the importance of incident reporting and having a system in place that can help your workplace be as safe as it can be.

Incident reporting helps you answer important questions

An incident reporting system not only allows you to keep on track of any incidents that occur, it helps you to prepare and track the near misses too.

An incident reporting system helps you answer questions around how safe your workplace is and how well prepared you are to deal with incidents, so that if anything did happen, you would know that you are doing the most you can to remain compliant and minimise risk.

Being able to track and trace your compliance is very important, as it allows you to cover yourself in the event of an incident. This is especially important in high risk industries such as construction, oil and gas, power plants, roads and buildings and hazardous sectors.

Incident Reporting is a requirement of any health and safety management system and when not carried out efficiently, the knock on effect may result in excessive costs to the business.

How does an incident reporting system help your business?

Above and beyond ensuring that you remain compliant, an incident reporting system ensures that you take a systematic approach to managing safety that is likely to minimise incidents in the first place. This will save you money, save you reputation damage, and keep your people safe.

Incident reporting systems enable you to maintain an attitude of continuous improvement – including the necessary organisational structures, accountabilities, policies and procedures to create a Continuous Improvement Cycle.

Incident reporting systems enable you to:

Protect your employees
Maintain a working environment that is safe
Minimise risk
Ensure that employees know how to report an incident
Ensure employees take care of the health and safety of themselves and others.
Help you identify trends and incident types
Help you predict incidents and prevent them
Helps your business remain compliant
Conduct periodic reviews to assess risk

What are the key benefits of incident reporting?

A well designed incident management system has some key benefits. These include:

Incident reporting systems prepare your business to deal with incidents

One of the key benefits of an incident reporting system is that it encourages employees to be prepared for an incident.

It also helps you understand how and why incidents occur and keeps the entire organization aware of their actions in real-time. The platform enables other employees to offer guidance or advice and lets critical stakeholders see the specific actions that were taken and how the incident was resolved.

Increase communication within the organisation

Often, incidents occur because of bad communication within an organisation, however a reporting system helps to minimise this risk. The increased safety procedures for employees, clients, and contractors allow effective communication channels at all times.

With cloud-based technology, incident reporting systems can be accessed from any computer or mobile device with internet access, meaning that people can communicate in real-time in the event of an incident.

In an emergency situation, incident management software provides a timeline of communications so that senior managers can track the flow of communications and see whether the incident was escalated or resolved, and how. This gives you real-time situational awareness.

Increased safety for employees, clients and contractors

With better incident reporting systems in place, you’ll be able to provide a safer environment for anyone you interact with.

Risks to all parties can be minimised and managed, meaning that your business should see less incidents and improved compliance.

How can incident reporting systems be implemented?

Implementing incident reporting systems needn’t be difficult. Beakon’s system can be configured to report, investigate, analyse and proactively action issues across all work disciplines with ease.

If you’d like to learn more about incident reporting systems and how they work, you can take advantage of our free trial to give it a go.

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