Outlining Incident Management

You can use EHS Incident Management to record, 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 some important definitions to mention.

• An incident is an unplanned, 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, 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 an 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.

This is reflected in the system by the following categories of incidents:

• Incident
• Near Miss
• Safety Observation

The SAP Fiori Launchpad provides access to all apps relevant for the role of the current user.

The EHS Incident Management provides a centralized solution to track all types of incidents, and 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 and create incident out of it.
• Data structure, user interface, and security model tailored to the three types (technically, categories) Incident, 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 have the following benefits:

• Learn from analyzing a central database of all types of events to reduce incident rates and incident 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 includes the following steps:

Report an incident.

Initial incident entry/injury illness log entry.

Review and complete an incident record.

You can perform the following activities during this step:

• 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.

Perform an incident investigation and root-cause analysis.

Generate analytical reports.

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

• Generate spreadsheet reports.
• Generate BI analytical reports.

Determine and conduct corrective actions.

Close incident.

During the initial reporting of the incident, the incident reporter has the task of recording the occurred event. The Report Incident (Fiori) app provides a single and simplified entry screen to record the initial information. Depending on the type of event (incident, near miss or safety observation) different sets of fields are displayed.

When you have entered all information in the app, to record the entered information, choose Send. To review and complete the record in the incident management application, the responsible incident manager receives a task in their My Inbox app.

To report incidents, near misses, and safety observations through a mobile device, you can also use the Report Incident mobile app. With 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 the Incident Management solution.

After you have entered all the required information in the app, to record the details, choose Send. To review and complete the record in the incident management application, the responsible incident manager receives a task in their My Inbox app.

Sometimes, you may not be able to use the Report Incident application to report incidents, safety observations, or near misses. If so, use an interactive form (SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe) that is stored on your device or on a public medium such as your intranet.

In this form, you enter the details of the incident, near miss, or safety observation. When you have entered all information on the form, return the form to the incident management application by choosing Send. 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.

The Injury/Ilness Log enables you to enter and manage different kinds of medical assistance provided to employees at your company. You can record first aid treatment and the treatment of minor injuries, and the treatment of preexisting injuries or 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 of the affected location receives a task in their My Inbox to review and complete the incidents, near misses, and safety observations that have been created using the incident reporting app.

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

• Maintain all involved persons.
• Maintain all involved assets.
• Maintain information about environmental impact regarding the release of waste, dangerous chemicals, and any other substances into the air, ground, and water. Maintain information about cleanup of the released substances and their safe disposal.
• 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, which allows the involved parties in the incident management process to receive workflow-based notifications.

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

On the Basic Information tab, the incident manager can view all the 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 a location was assigned to a reported incident, but no address or plant ID were specified where the incident occurred, the incident management application automatically assigns the address and the plant of the location to the incident.

The People tab helps the incident manager to add people or organizations that were involved in the incident. They can 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 the 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.
• influences on health and safety.

The Assets tab allows the incident manager to capture assets of Equipment Vehicle, Property. You can add type-specific details and information about the damage 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:

• A description of the released material.
• The type and size of the release.
• The cleanup responses.

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

The incident manager can track costs and income associated with an incident (and possible near misses and safety observations). This tracking enables 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 situation.

The investigation process contains several steps, the purpose of which is to document the results of the investigation. The planning is normally done by the investigation lead who. During the investigation flow, the investigation lead adds the steps that will be applied.

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

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

If necessary, the investigation processes can be reopened.

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 results of the investigation. The investigation results help to determine 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 must 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 this hierarchy based on their internal policy for documenting the causes of the incident.

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

In Incident Management, you can generate reports that are necessary to fulfill legal reporting requirements. You can generate data that you include 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 sublocations and the output format such as PDF file (print version) or CSV file.

For other customer-specific internal reporting, this process can be used a copy template.

On the Tasks tab, the incident manager can navigate to the incident tasks by choosing Manage Tasks. Here, you can add or change tasks. The system communicates the tasks to the My Inbox app of the assignees.

Using the My Inbox app, the persons involved in the implementation, approval or completion of a task can view its details.

The assignee can confirm the successful completion of the task. Other operations like canceling or re-assignment are also possible (if the required authorizations exist).

After reviewing and completing the incident details and ensuring that all sub-processes have 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.

If further details need to be documented later, the incident can be reopened.

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 of summary reports is also possible.​

The key features are:

• Generate report forms for incidents, injuries, and illnesses 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 to search for incidents, near misses, and safety observations by various filter criteria. Filtering by incident category, group, location, and involved person can be performed. You can also navigate to the incident, near miss, and safety observation records to view or edit their data.​

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​

To be able to calculate the incident-related KPIs in the system, the hours worked must be entered.

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

This app displays a graphical representation of the rate of incident cases that involve hours spent by employees away from work. The rate is calculated in the following way:

• I = number of incidents that had one or more Lost Days, or had one or more Restricted Days, or resulted in an employee transferring to a different job within the company.
• H = number of employee labor hours spent in the company.
• DART Rate = I * 200,000 / H

The incident manager can instantly determine the incident rate for all currently available data and display it graphically. Also, details such as numbers of hours worked, number of recordable cases, and view results by location can be viewed.

The incident rate is calculated based on the OSHA regulation. The OSHA Recordable Incident Rate (or Incident Rate) is calculated the following way:

• C = number of recordable cases.
• H = number of employee labor hours spent in the company.
• Incident Rate = C * 200,000 / H

The Incident Manager can instantly determine the number of recordable incidents/cases for all currently available data.

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.

The total hours worked are determined by using the data from the previously explained Manage Hours Worked app.

Building on the SAP tool Analysis Path Framework, ad-hoc analysis based on predefined data dimensions can be executed at any time with real time data. The analysis is designed through sequential analytical steps where the data output of one step serves as data input for the subsequent step (multilevel data filtering).

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

You can use the following analytics apps to analyze coherency 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. With 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. With 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 (see also earlier slide).

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 multiple incidents, 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 by using:

• The SAP Fiori launchpad.
• A mobile app.
• The offline function of Adobe Forms.

During the incident processing the incident manager can use the standard functionality to record basic incident information, maintain all involved persons, and 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 incident with an injured person, a regulatory form can be used.