Does Your Safety Permit Solution Have These 6 Features?
Safety permits, isolations, risk assessments, and LOTOs are crucial in any organization’s day-to-day process. These essential safety functions daily and directly affect the wellbeing of employees and the overall success of the company. The largest share of this burden falls upon the decision makers of the business.
The systems and process of your work should help to streamline the overall process. Routine safety tasks should be easy and fast – while maintaining accuracy and attention to details. We’ve listed six features that will make a transformation in your daily efforts to keep your company productive and employees safe.
Does your safety permitting simplify shutdowns?
A plant shutdown is challenging and time-consuming in the best of situations. Does your safety permit process allow for templates to be copied from prior shutdowns as well as including links to the associated permits? This automation saves hundreds of work hours spent planning and writing permits and risk assessments.
Can you generate a safety permit requests in advance?
Any late safety permit requests created directly prior to work commencement are often ineffective and frequently more time consuming. Creating plans “in the moment” generates opportunities for errors as well as limiting the time allowed to properly review the process. A solution that automatically creates complete permit requests in conjunction with required forms and documents will help any team plan for the most optimized schedule.
Does your permitting system integrate?
As you begin to launch your permitting solution across an entire organization, even multiple sites around the world, can you be certain that your safety permit process is being followed consistently from location to location? An electronic solution that integrates easily with your existing EAM provides consistency, eliminating data duplication and potential mistakes that this can cause. Critically, the integration also enables communication facilitation between employees with an organization. This creates a more efficient process because the information is easily shared and accessible.
Does your permitting solution automatically reference your data and avoid potential conflicts?
Looking for potential conflicts is one of the most time-consuming tasks involved with safety work. While complex, this process is vitally important to the overall safety as the team, as well as the element that is most likely to be challenged by human error.
The process of automatically cross-referencing highlights items and isolations that are in conflict. This step provides a time and labor-saving indicator of future conflicts when merging jobs or schedules.
By proactively analyzing the complete scope of work planned, an electronic system will automatically define hazards and highlight these incompatible tasks in advance of the work to be completed, allowing for remedies to be planned prior to the initiation of work.
Does your permitting solution make creating, sharing, and linking isolation certificates easy?
Do your current isolations slow you down? Is the team constantly repeating the isolation process complete with inconsistencies from individual to individual? In a perfect world, every organization would have a library templates for each piece of equipment and work ready to utilize for permits. The ability to reference a complete store of documentation would not only make planning more efficient, it would also create the consistency of proven safe methods. Crucially, ePTW software such as SafeTK™ saves time and effort by enabling the re-use of established plans.
Isolations are the most useful when they are able to be shared and linked to packages so isolations can be rolled back in the most efficient way possible during recommissioning to ensure a faster return to operations.
Is your safety permit system easy to search?
If you are still using a paper-based process, the act of finding permits, isolation plans is time-consuming. The most effective process for permit retention and audits requires a digital solution that is up-to-date and designed for your industry, allowing operators to search for permits by a range of criteria.
Planners and Schedulers also reap the rewards of viewing the permits in a timeline view. This feature identifies congestion points and conflicts with the ability to dig deep into the details of each permit creating a quick investigation and resolution.
