Incident Management

You can use EHS Incident Management to record initially and then review and complete incidents, safety observations, and near misses to fulfill your environment, health, and safety (EHS) requirements on a regional and global scale. This solution provides various methods for recording the data to accommodate online and offline situations as well as skilled and unskilled users. After initial recording, you can collect additional information from the people involved, investigate why an incident occurred, and track the financial impact on the organization and its assets. You can also assess risk, report data internally or externally to fulfill legal, regulatory, and company reporting responsibilities, and analyze aggregated incident data.

Before looking at the business process, there are a number of important definitions that need to be mentioned.

• An incident is an unplanned, which means it is an undesired event that adversely affects the completion of a task and / or endangers the safety of an employee or the environment.
• A near miss is an unplanned, which means it is an undesired event where no damage was caused and no personal injury sustained, but where a slight shift in time or position, damage and/or injury could have occurred easily.
• A safety observation is the identification and documentation of a potential inappropriate or unsafe behavior or hazardous condition that could lead to an incident. A safety observation could, for example, result from the following: planned or unplanned direct observations employee suggests audits inspection job hazard analyses.

In the system, we distinguish the following categories of incidents:

• Incident
• Near Miss
• Safety Observation

The above figure, The SAP Fiori Launchpad - Role-based Entry Screen for all Users, provides you with an overview of the SAP Fiori launchpad.

The EHS Incident Management solution aims to provide you with a centralized solution to track all types of incidents, drive a consistent process for incident entry, investigation, and corrective tasks.

The solution provides the following capabilities:

• Multiple options for incident data entry, including mobile and offline entry
• Record injury / illness log entry log and create incident out of it.
• Data structure, user interface, and security model specific to incident type, near miss and safety observations
• Direct integration to ERP and HR processes
• Workflow-driven initial notifications, investigation steps, and corrective actions
• Real-time analytical reports and dashboard views
• Real-time incident rate calculations

Customers can benefit from the following:

• Learn from analyzing a central database of all types of events to reduce incident rates and severity
• Increased visibility and automation of tasks and corrective actions
• Reduced time for processing incidents and regulatory reporting
• Valuable process integration within EHS and other SAP applications

The process of EHS Incident Management starts with initial recording, you can collect additional information from the people involved, investigate why an incident occurred, and track the financial impact on the organization and its assets. In detail, the process of managing incidents include the following steps:

1. Report an incident (initial incident entry / injury illness log entry).

2. Review and complete an incident record.

You can perform the following activities during this step, for example:

• Send inquiries to get more information about the incident
• Assess the incident in a risk matrix
• Track the financial impact of the incident
• Report the incident to authorities or for internal purposes

3. Perform an incident investigation and root-cause analysis.

4. Generate analytical reports.

You can perform the following activities during this step, for example:

• Generate spreadsheet reports.
• Generate BI analytical reports.

5. Determine and conduct corrective actions.

6. Close incident.

In this step, the incident reporter has the task of recording the occurred event. The Report Incident app provides a single entry screen to record the initial information of the occurred event. Depending on the type of event (incident, near miss or safety observation) different set of fields will be displayed.

When you have entered all information in the app, you choose the Send button to record the details. The responsible incident manager receives a task in his or her My Inbox app to review and complete the record in the incident management application.

To report incidents, near misses, and safety observations through a mobile device, you can also use the Report Incident app. Using this app, you can report incidents, near misses, and safety observations, even if your device is not connected to a network. When you are reconnected to the network, you can submit the recorded incidents, near misses, and safety observations to Incident Management.

When you have entered all information in the app, choose the Send pushbutton to record the details. The responsible incident manager receives a task in his or her My Inbox app to review and complete the record in the incident management application.

If you are working offline (you are not using the incident management application), you can report incidents, safety observations, and near misses using an interactive form (SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe) that is stored on a public medium such as an intranet.

In this form, you enter the details of the incident, near miss, or safety observation. When you have entered all information to the form, you use the Send pushbutton at the end of the form to return the form to the incident management application. The responsible incident manager receives a task in his or her My Inbox app to review and complete the record in the incident management application.

This feature enables you to enter and manage different kinds of medical assistance provided to employees at your company. You can record first aid and the treatment of minor injuries, as well as the treatment of pre-existing injuries and aid given to employees who are not feeling well. You can enter details such as provided medication, health center visits, and visits to physicians.

From the recorded injury / illness log entry, an incident can be created.

The incident manager receives a task in My Inbox to review and complete the incidents (also near misses and safety observations) that have been created during the incident reporting.

The incident manager can perform the following activities during this step:

• Maintain all involved persons
• Maintain all involved assets
• Maintain release data
• Send inquiries to get more information about the incident
• Assess the incident in a risk matrix
• Track the financial impact of the incident
• Report the incident to authorities or for internal purposes
• Trigger corrective and preventive tasks

Note that the My Inbox app is the central app that allows the involved parties in the incident management process to receive a workflow-based notifications.

Incident Processing includes various tasks for reviewing and completing an incident record. The application provides you with multiple tabs to track all aspects of the incident record. Different tabs and fields are shown depending on the incident types selected and user authorization.

On the Basic Information tab, the incident manager can view all relevant and most important aspects of the recorded event and manage the general information about the incident such as description, date and time, and location. When you assign a location to a reported incident and you did not specify an address or a plant ID where the incident occurred, the incident management application automatically assigns the address and the plant ID of the location to the incident.

The People tab supports the incident manager when they seek to add people or organizations that were involved in the incident and assign each involved person or organization to at least one specific role, such as injured person or witness.

The system automatically updates the list of involved persons while you enter information on other tabs, for example, if you specify a vehicle driver under Assets tab.

Depending on the role that is assigned to an involved person, you can add further information for this person such as injuries and illnesses, treatment, work experience, absences and restrictions, and influences on health and safety.

The Assets tab allows the incident manager to capture assets of the type equipment, vehicle, or property. You can add type-specific details as well as information about the damages that occurred.

If a material was released into the air, ground, or water, you can enter detailed information about this release in the Release tab, including description of the released material, the type and size of the release, and the cleanup responses.

The Notices of Violation tab is displayed if the incident has been classified with a group notice of violation and supports the incident manager to specify notices of violation that were issued to your organization.

The incident manager can track costs and income that are associated with an incident (also near miss and safety observation) to enable your organization to understand both the immediate and long-term financial impact of the incident on the organization and its stakeholders. To do this, you add financial transaction data associated with the incident such as direct expenses, reimbursements, fines, benefits paid, and production losses on the Financial Tracking tab.

The Risk Matrix tab supports the incident manager in documenting a high-level assessment of the risk considering the initial and residual risk circumstances.

The investigation process contains several steps in which the purpose is to document the result of the investigation. The planning is normally done by the investigation lead who adds in the investigation flow the steps that will be executed.

The information then can be gathered either from the different involved members of the investigation or the investigation lead himself. Each step in the process can be assigned to a different expert do that all aspects of the incident data can be analyzed.

The required tasks can be defined as part of the investigation and can be also linked to a particular root cause if required. When all steps are completed, the investigation lead can close the investigation.

If required, the investigation processes can be re-opened.

The Investigation tab contains its own process steps for initiating an investigation, tracking steps based on the incident type, and enabling root-cause determination. The system supports the incident manager in documenting the result of the investigation. This supports the determination of the causes that led to an incident, near miss, or safety observation. Depending on legal or organization-specific requirements, an investigation can include different investigation steps, for example, a root-cause analysis or lessons learned.

This is a highly configurable process and can represent the customer-specific steps which need to be documented in the system.

The root-cause analysis can be configured in the system as an investigation step. A predefined hierarchy of root causes can be used as an example. Customers can adapt the hierarchy based on their internal policy for documenting the causes of the incident.

The system allows the leading investigator to generate fast and ad-hoc investigation summary report and share the document internally with other involved parties.

In the Incident Management app, you can generate reports that are necessary to fulfill legal, regulatory, and reporting requirements. You can generate data that you process in incident management in the following types of reports:

• Legal reports: Used to report incidents to authorities, for example, to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the United States or to an insurance company.
• Incident summary reports: Contains data of more than one incident, for example, a log of all incidents involving an injury that occurred during the year.

In the Manage Summary Reports - Incident Management app, you can manage incident summary reports that are based on legal standards. When generating an incident summary report, you have to select the location, including its sub-locations and the output format such as PDF file (print version) or CSV file.

For other customer-specific internal reporting, the same process can be used as an example.

On the Tasks tab, the incident manager can navigate to the incident tasks using the Manage Tasks button. A task that has to be fulfilled to the assignees can be added. The system communicates the tasks to the My Inbox app of the assigned implementor who has to trigger the task in Environment, Health, and Safety or in the integrated SAP components.

Using the My Inbox app, the involved persons in the task implementation, approval and completion can view the details. The example displays a task received by the assignee who can document the implementation of the task. Other operations can be performed if the required authorizations have been granted to the business user.

After reviewing and completing the incident details and ensuring all sub-processes has been completed (besides recurrent tasks), the incident manager can initiate the closure of the incident. With this step the workflow of the incident will be closed, and the data can no longer be edited.

In case further details need to be document, the incident can be re-opened.

The Manage Summary Reports app supports the incident manager in getting an overview of generated incident summary reports that are necessary to fulfill legal, regulatory, or company-specific reporting requirements. Creation and generation of summary reports is possible.​

The key features are as follows:

• Generate report forms for incidents, injuries, and illnesses in order to fulfill legal, regulatory, or company-specific reporting requirements.​
• Search for and display generated incident summary reports that you want to make available internally in your company or submit to authorities, such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the United States.

The Manage Incidents app enables the incident manager to efficiently manage the recorded incidents.​ The app provides the possibility of searching for incidents, near misses, and safety observations by various filter criteria. Filtering by incident category, group, location, and involved person can be performed. A navigation to the incident, near miss, and safety observation records to edit their data is also possible.​

The app provides several filters to the incident manager that allow refinement of the result of the search.​ By default, the displayed filters are as follows:​

• Incident Category
• Date​
• Location ​
• Status​
• Involved Person​
• Group​

In order to be able to calculate the incident related KPIs in the system, the hours worked has to be entered.

The Manage Hours Worked app supports the incident manager to monitor and organize the work hours spent in the locations by employees and contractors. New records and edit existing records can be edited. The system uses these records using the OSHA forms for reporting in a follow-up process.

This app provides you with a graphical representation of the rate of incident cases that involve hours spent by employees away from work. You can view this display. The rate is calculated by adding up the number of incidents that had one or more Lost Days, one or more Restricted Days or that resulted in an employee transferring to a different job within the company, and multiplying that number by 200,000, then dividing that number by the number of employee labor hours spent in the company.

The Incident Manager can now instantly determine the Incident Rate for all currently available data and display in a graphical representation. In addition, details such as numbers of hours worked, numbers of recordable cases, and view results by location can be viewed.

The incident rate is defined based on the OSHA regulation. The OSHA Recordable Incident Rate (or Incident Rate) is calculated by multiplying the number of recordable cases by 200,000, and then dividing that number by the number of labor hours spent in the company.

The Incident Manager can now instantly determine the Number of Recordable Incidents for all currently available data. For the KPI rates calculation the total hours worked are determined by the Manage Hours Worked app.

Using the analytical path framework ad-hoc analysis based on predefined data dimensions can be executed at any time with real-time data and can be designed through analytical steps.

There are several analytical apps that support the incident manager to analyze the recorded data.

For example, you can use the following analytics apps to analyze coherences in Incident Management:

• Incidents - Detailed Analysis app - With this app, you can analyze incidents, near misses, and safety observations that have been recorded in incident management. You can add several analysis steps to create an analysis path. With this analysis path, you can evaluate the data you need for information and reporting purposes.
• Injuries and Illnesses - Detailed Analysis app - With this app, you can analyze recordable injury / illness cases that have been recorded in the incident management application. An injury / illness case is considered recordable if a legal report form exists for the injured person in the incident management application, and if reporting is required for this report form. You can add several analysis steps to create an analysis path. Using this analysis path, you can evaluate the data you need for information and reporting purposes.

There are a couple of standard KPIs, which are delivered with the standard Incident Management solution - for example, DART Rate. Using the DART Rate app, you can display a graphical representation of the rate of incident cases that involve hours spent by employees away from work.

You use this component to produce internal and external reports that are necessary to fulfill legal, regulatory, or internal reporting requirements. You can generate data that you recorded in incident management in the following types of reports:

Legal Reports

You can report incidents to authorities, for example, to the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) in the United States or to an insurance company.

Summary Reports / Analytics

You can generate a report that contains data from more than one incident - for example, a log of all incidents involving an injury that occurred over the year.

Internal Reports / Analytics

You can generate reports for internal purposes.

The incident management solution contains functional components in three separate areas. To support the incident recording process, the solution provides functional components to record the occurred events either through the SAP Fiori launchpad, mobile app, or using the offline function of Adobe Forms.

During the incident processing the incident manager is enabled to use the standard functionality to record basic incident information, maintain all involved persons, determine and log notices of violation. Critical information about environmental spills, injury / illness info or root causes during the investigation can be entered in the incident details.

Through the functional components the incident management process supports the incident manager creating outputs from the incident. If you are obliged to provide information to the authorities about an occurred incident with injured person, you can use a regulatory form.