The need for process transparency in safety and operational risk management is at the basis of every safety management system. Since managing safety and operational risk is vital in many complex manufacturing sectors, it is important to implement transparent guidelines and objectives for all employees and contractors to make sure they are an active part of the safety culture.

This year has brought some exceptional challenges for safety professionals. The novel coronavirus has forced us all to shift our safety focus from sometimes reactive to entirely preventive. Guidelines are strict, and objectives stricter yet. The risk is simply too high now to wait and see. Process transparency, in other words, has become a necessary means for direct control of the risks connected to COVID-19, across the entire management chain.

With pressure mounting, many companies have begun looking into digital solutions for work which often still happened on paper, such as shift handovers, permitting, and forms. These processes typically bring employees in close contact, and paper-based systems make contamination a very real possibility. The need for solutions of this kind is clearer than ever before.

At TenForce, we recently shared our view on how our software can offer assistance to companies who are experiencing an added strain. We focused on a number of process flows and templates that can help companies manage the impact of the virus.

Now, we would like to dive deeper into how our shift management solution can help mitigate the risks while also bringing together physically separated teams. We’ve taken a look at this before and you can also check out our CEO Jan Van den Nieuwenhof’s post about ‘the perfect day‘ practices.

The invisibility of human interaction

While some data collection is done automatically via PLC units and MES systems (measuring malfunctions, downtime, and overall performance of a production line), some data cannot be collected as easily. What, for example, was the cause of a malfunction? What should the next shift know, and keep track of? Who was responsible at that time? The questions go on, of course, but the point here is that the information transfer tends to happen via logbooks, forms, and checklists on paper.

This is currently a problem, plain and simple. It has become hard to keep these employees safe and to mitigate the exceptional risks they have to take to hand over shift information if they’re supposed to use paper to do it. Because social distancing measures cannot be applied as they should, transmitting the disease is a real likelihood to consider. At the same time, management needs the information per shift to be able to act on it and improve. No company can simply drop this follow-up.

And the issue is actually larger than this. Managerial staff is now often forced to work from home, which might result in a potential lapse in oversight. Some managers might find it hard to fulfill their roles without going on-site, which puts them in considerable danger as well. This is where the limitations of software solutions that are not specifically designed to deal with these situations become clear. We’re all familiar with the complex and bloated excel sheets that tend to propagate as ad-hoc solutions during times like these.

Shifting into gear

A streamlined and automated software solution has clear benefits outside these extreme circumstances, of course. But when crisis strikes as it does now, software effectiveness shows even greater value. Here are a number of ways TenForce’s Shift Management helps companies mitigate the health impact of COVID-19 and improve visibility overall:

• Use templates to smartly assign tasks and checks to specific shifts (morning, day, or night).

The entire unit assigned to a specific shift will be able to access these tasks and report on progress. The tasks and results are available for the next shift, with all information recorded in granular detail through automated logs. You can use this to promote hand sanitizer use with employees, follow up on supply, and create small questionnaires per shift related to health and safety.

• Set up recurrent tasks to gain immediate feedback on critical or non-critical issues.

For example, if you notice problems popping up at certain times, you can set up a checklist to be automatically assigned to a specific shift team. You can use this to keep track of PPE use, production issues, and just about anything you want visibility on.

• Stay in touch and in control in an effective way, even remotely.

You can choose how you receive these notifications (via the web, via email, or as a phone notification). You can then orchestrate a response via the commenting system standard in TenForce. In this way, you’ll stay in the loop, and your team will be in touch as well via a smart tagging system.

• With integrated dashboards, you’ll be able to see what goes on in specific areas of the plant or production line.

We help to categorize incidents and observations made during shifts, which gives managers more insight into reporting.

And we know. While nothing beats human contact and interactions will always hold amounts of data software cannot capture, the usefulness of a software solution should not be dismissed out-of-hand. The above are just a few examples of how we can help you create a safer environment today, for a productive environment tomorrow.

We’re here to help. Please stay safe and get in touch with us if you’d like to know more.