A leading provider of air services, operating in 35 countries across 6 continents and having served 320 airlines, embarked on a journey to improve and align the safety processes across all locations. The initiative started with ground handling, with plans to later extend it to travel and catering. The company was looking to replace its manual processes and applications with one integrated solution deployed on the cloud to manage risks, safety incidents, frontline observations, and policies.
Towards this goal, the company teamed up with MetricStream in 2015 to promote the highest possible safety and security standards. It implemented a suite of MetricStream products, built on the MetricStream Platform and hosted on the MSI Cloud, and benefited from a centralized view of risks, increased frontline engagement, effective incident reporting and management, and more.
The Road to Automation
For a company that deals with the lives of people on a daily basis, the importance of effective and robust risk and incident management cannot be overstated. With its operations spread across the globe, the lack of a common application to manage incident management processes was a major pain point for the company. Its previous manual approach was also proving to be highly inefficient.
The fragmented and inconsistent approach across locations made it difficult for the executive team and the leadership to have complete visibility into operational, health, and safety-related risks. This hampered their ability to effectively identify existing loopholes, areas of improvement, and other concerns requiring immediate attention.
In addition, as the company operates in a highly regulated industry, policy management was also one of the major challenges faced by the company. The problem was aggravated as it had to deal with the regulatory aspects pertaining to various jurisdictions where the airports were operating. The company wanted a system that supported its vision of a “Continuous Improvement Program” and not just served as a document repository.
To overcome these challenges, the company started looking for a solution that could enable effective management of all standards, policies, and procedures, control workplace hazards, and prevent safety-related incidents from occurring. It chose MetricStream and implemented Policy and Document Management, Observations Management (Mobile Application), Case and Incident Management, and Enterprise Risk Management products. Three key processes were rolled out as part of the implementation:
- Incident Management: Provides capability to report, record, and investigate actual and potential incidents.
- SafeAlign: Provides capability to develop safety leadership for supervisors and managers, with functionalities to schedule leadership development workshops and coaching sessions.
- BAPP (Behavioral Accident Prevention Process): Provides capability to proactively identify the ‘At-Risk’ behaviors and implementing corrective actions, along with regular communications and feedbacks to reduce the injury rates.
Enhanced Risk Visibility and Single Source of Truth
MetricStream has simplified managing, recording, and tracking observations and incidents across various airports. All the information from the first and second line of employees is aggregated at the enterprise level in an automated manner. In addition, the implementation has enabled increased use of remote assurance activities, which has helped establish a single source of truth across the enterprise.
These capabilities have empowered the senior management and leadership to have a consistent, clear, and centralized view of the risks pertaining to the environment, health, and safety (EHS) areas. Furthermore, real-time reports and graphical dashboards provide comprehensive visibility and actionable insights on critical observations and issues.
Challenge
- Fragmented and manual approach.
- Lack of visibility into risks.
- Inconsistent incident management practices across locations.
- Ineffective document and policy management.
Business Value Realized
- Improved visibility into risks and incidents
- Increased frontline engagement
- Enhanced risk aggregation, assessment, and mitigation capabilities
- Better understanding of company policies and protocols
Quantitative Benefits Snapshot
- More than 200,000 observations captured in the past 2 years, resulting in lesser incidents across the organization.
- 100,000 attestations done ensuring the employees are aware of the organizational policies to avert any risk.
- Over 20,000 actions created and action tracking increased from 17% to 89% leading to better ownership of issues and their closures.
- Compliance related incident tracking and reporting increased from 4% to 96%.
- More than 500% increase in user access of the system across all levels, giving a boost to the overall observations and incidents reported by employees
Frontline Engagement
All the frontend employees serve as a huge and important resource of information in airports. As such, the company was looking for a mobile capability that could be carried easily by every employee on the ground with a simple user interface to ensure adaptability among ground workers. With the mobile app for Observations Management, all the frontline employees are now able to capture the incidents, observations, or near misses. Furthermore, MetricStream’s intuitive and user-friendly capabilities have made it easier for the company to drive risk management principles into the frontlines of the business.
Today, frontline business users can identify and report emerging risk observations. To capture an issue/observation, they now have an easy-to-use and graphically intuitive form. MetricStream also allows users to view the status of the issue captured and assign actions with due dates. In case of sensitive issues, the product has capabilities that enable users to report issues discreetly and anonymously.
Effective Risk Management and Mitigation
MetricStream’s survey capabilities have enabled the company to gather all the risk-related information from the employees and assess them to further mitigate the impact of any such EHS-related risks. The company said that it is now better positioned to assess operational risks by verifying the effectiveness of critical controls by both the first and second lines of defense. In addition, the Case and Incident Management product has enabled the leadership and business owners to view and track the frequency of occurrence of such incidents and pull reports with similar incidents and issues in past for in-depth comparisons.
Improved Understanding of Company Policies and Protocols
The implementation of MetricStream Policy and Document Management has enabled the company to store and manage more than 12,000 documents and ensure that all the employees have a clear view and understanding of the company policies and protocols with respect to EHS.
Conclusion
The company has greatly benefitted from the implementation of MetricStream products. It said that around 200,000 observations and 27,000 incidents have been reported so far and several thousand first line assurance verifications and attestations have been completed. The company also noted that there has been a significant increase in remote passive assurance activities during the pandemic—a 500% increase in users accessing its systems at all levels due to the ease of use of the system.
“We are happy to say our compliance to incident reporting and tracking in the new software is now at 96%, previously in the first edition, it was 4%. Our action tracking today is at 89% and previously it was I think 17%.” - Senior Vice President Safety & Standards at the company.
