Top 5 Tips For Implementing an EHS Incident Management Solution
An investment in technology requires careful considerations to ensure maximum value. As an EHS Technology Consultancy, Summit has had the opportunity to implement Incident Management solutions for a number of organizations and based on this experience, we have come up with a few tips to keep in mind when implementing your solution.
Understand The Regulatory Requirements. One of the most important things to keep top of mind when implementing your solution is the need to understand and meet your organization’s regulatory reporting requirements. Depending on the industry of your organization, you may have requirements from agencies such as such as OSHA, MSHA, WSIB or any number of other jurisdiction / industry-based agencies that will be critical to address. Based on our experience, the configuration of your solution to your company’s specific needs is critical to ensuring that those requirements are met. Even seemingly unrelated implementation decisions such as Org Structure layout can facilitate (or create a barrier to) ease of regulatory reporting. Since this is one of the fundamental reasons organizations invest in an EHS Incident Management system, it is critical to have a detailed understanding of all of your regulatory requirements at the onset of your solution design process.
Understand Your Organization’s Workflow. As you undertake the design of your Incident Management system, it is good to remember that the outcomes you will realize will be a direct reflection of your processes and workflows. By reviewing and documenting all of your key workflows during the solution design activity, it will ensure all key scenarios are being addressed. We always encourage clients to strike a balance between trying to accommodate “the 1%” that will stretch the design of any process and finding opportunities to simplify (perhaps even to automate) how the majority of incidents are handled. By understanding (and documenting) the details, your Incident Management system can be configured to best meet the needs specific to your organization. Unfortunately, when this hasn’t happened, we often see legacy systems that fall short in their ability to deliver true business value back to the customer.
Consider The User. Summit believes one of the true measures of a successful implementation of an Incident Management system is User Adoption. If a system is too complex or cumbersome to use, a user may be less likely to use it to report an incident, which leads to all sorts of implications and risk to the organization. The solution should be designed to be intuitive, realistic in terms of the data a user must input, easy-to-use, and easy-to-remember to use. By taking the varying levels of users into consideration as you design and implement your solution, you will increase user adoption and ultimately, a more complete dataset will be realized.
Strike A Balance With Notifications. Notifications, for an Incident Management system, create the connection between an incident and an individual that must take some form of action. By sending out notifications that guide the user to the specific action required, it makes it easy (i.e. Increased user adoption). Be careful though…care should be taken to not configure your solution to send out too many notifications. Sending out too many often results in notification fatigue, where a user is inundated with emails to the point where they dismiss them and take no action when one is needed. As you think through your workflow and solution design, be diligent in including notifications where necessary to maximize their value to the overall solution. Furthermore, consider batching the common “FYI” email where no action is required into a single daily or weekly report that is sent on a predictable schedule.
Begin With The End In Mind While the main motivation for an Incident Management system is tied to its ability to efficiently meet the regulatory requirements for an organization, it is also important to consider the other data that can be recorded and leveraged within the system. Starting your project with a clear understanding of your KPIs and their inputs helps to avoid the dreaded realization at the end of the project that a key input is missing and will still require someone to keep a side spreadsheet. While many Incident Management systems come with standard, pre-defined KPIs, they often need a mechanism for data input in order to generate. For instance, most organizations capture hours worked as a basis for a number of KPIs. With proactive solution design, this datapoint can be captured through integrations with other systems, or a recurring workflow task can be automatically generated for a user who is responsible for the data entry if an integration is not feasible.
Whether you are looking to make updates to your existing solution or procuring a new EHS Incident Management technology, take the time to plan your implementation to achieve the desired results.
Over the coming weeks, we will be digging deeper into each of the tips above, so be sure to follow our LinkedIn Company page.
