CoreHSE.com BLOG

If you are in the Lansing area, come hear me speak about HS&E data management.  It's going to be fun!

Michigan Safety Conference

OK, I have to admit it - I know too little about the world of Workers' Compensation management.  I've been so long on the Safety side of industry that I failed to appreciate the absolute depth of consideration Comp folks go to properly manage the care of injured workers.  I was surrounded on all sides by post-accident services from Dental repair (they are bones you know!) to every stripe of legal and medical services.  Here's what I found most interesting - there is almost a pathological separation from those who administer these injuries and those who could do something about preventing them.

Now, don't get me wrong - Comp folks *know* that an injury prevented is the most effective management.  It's just that most professionals work on the wrong side of the house.  From what I could tell, most Comp folks report through some type of risk management in their organization (read legal, tax, insurance).  Whereas most safety folks usually live under operations and human resources.

So, what's a root-cause-concerned Comp professional to do if they want to  leap over the brick wall that seems to separate claims from operations?  How about an on-line information system that was designed to house both operational concerns (root cause analysis, tasks assignment, training records, etc) and injury outcomes (lost time, compensation/medical costs, injury type, etc).  Hmmm...now, where have I heard that before???

I had the destinct pleasure to present this approach with my colleague Patty Hostine.  We had a full room and got a chance to share our approach with a bunch of people.  We started by describing our database structure and why databases are WAY better than spreadsheets.  We then moved on to helping the group understand why doing all of this on line has lead us to be able to answer such soul-searching questions like: 

• How many lost days have we had as a result of injuries associated with Machine X?
• How much have injuries administered by Hospital X cost us?
• What is our total compensation reimbursement exposure on that product?

I think this was the biggest moment of the talk.  Being able to draw a straight and uninterrupted line between the results of injuries to the cause of them through the lense of an online data management system is the promise of CoreHSE.com.  Ultimately injuries are created by a *system*, not by a person, group, or for heaven's sake, a claims manager.  Our approach was to spread ownership for injuries across our organization and ask all who participated in making the injury possible to participate in removing the risk of future injuries.

Not a member yet?  What are you waiting for.  Sign up and use for free.  Get to know us.  We might just change your world.

Don't miss us at the Workers' Compensation and Disability Expo in Las Vegas.  We will be presenting on some of our best data management tricks of the trade.  Our 75-minute presentation will hit the highlights of good data design, understanding what information needs to be collected, and finally some hard lessons learned from a corporate rollout.

Steve Krile will be at the conference through Friday, so if you run in to him, say "Hi!".

Just a quick note to let you all know that we will be out and about over the next few months.  You can find us as the NOSHCON (http://www.noshcon.co.za/) next week.  Then, in November we will be at Workers' Compenstation and Disability (http://www.wcconference.com/) conference in Las Vegas.

If you should happen to spot us, make sure to say hi!  :)

We've been sitting on this for while, but we can't wait any longer.  The MSDS Module is now available.  And yes, just like all the other modules, it is FREE to all existing subscribers.  So, what are you waiting for?  Log on to your account and get started.  Don't have an account yet?  Sheesh - it's free for 30 days.  You have nothing to lose!

Now, to the good stuff.  MSDS and Material Management is one of those tasks that can really get under your skin.  No sooner have you printed out your sheets and cleaned up your books, then they are out of date again.  For those of you who haven't had the pleasure, it is standard practice and indeed mandated through most location's government regulations to keep updated copies of Material Safety Data Sheets for all chemicals workers could be exposed to available in case of emergency.  In essence, when a person is splashed with unknown chemical X, workers have a right to know what the material is and the best way to treat the exposure.

Printed books of Material Safety Data Sheets are good from certain respects.  They don't need electricity or an internet connection, they require no computer knowledge, and keeping multiple copies only costs a few trees.  That's the up-side to paper.  Now, for the challenges.  Paper is fragile and finite - burn it up and it's gone!  Paper never tells you when it's out of date.  Paper once misplaced is likely never to be found again (ehem ... anyone have a MSDS book with a "Please Don't Remove Pages" sticky on the cover?). 

At CoreHSE.com we take a fairly open view to all forms of access for your MSDSs.  As of this release you can search through your existing sheets, find old version, review substances by CAS number, add your own aliases, and more.  And we're just getting started.  Our Right To Know feature will be cleaned up and out to you in just a few weeks.  We're also looking in to iPhone and other mobile devices to making all your sheet information available to you wherever you are standing.

It's really too early in our development to show you anything, but I just can't stay quiet about it - this is going to be our richest module yet.  And yes, that's right subscribers, you'll get this one for free too!

One of the most tedious and fragile tasks an HS&E professional is faced with is keeping up with their Material Safety Data Sheets.  Binders and filing cabinets are only the beginning.  Then you have to worry about changes to the sheets, reliability of the supplier information, and making all this data available to your people.

It should hardly be a surprise to anyone that making Safety Data available to your employees is a requirement by law.  In just about every industrialized country, there are requirements to make this informaiton available either online or in paper format.  That one mentality - a person has the right to know what chemicals they are handling and the hazards associated with them - is simple enough.  But, keeping up with the tons of variations, test materials, and all the complexity around that concept is where CoreHSE.com really shines.

If all you want is a place to search for MSDSs, there are plenty of free sites on the web that will grant you that capability.  So, why would you want to store that information in CoreHSE.com?  Glad you asked!  Here are some of the features we are polishing up for our next big release:

• Electronic MSDS storage with versioning and expiration alerts
• Facility toggling - hide and show MSDSs depending on whether they are in use at a particular facility
• Vendor and Manufacturer reference available to all of your facilities
• Substance tracking by material
• Quick lookup to ensure avoiding duplicate entries
• Simple Right-To-Know access to your entire corporation
• Quick Indexing of risk phrases, pictograms, First Aid information, and other safety-related details
• Barcode storage  (for use in our future planned feature of chemical inventory and tracking features)

Of course there will be all the other things that go with this module that you've come to expect from CoreHSE.com.  The interface is a breeze to navigate, the pages are lightning fast, and you can be sure your data will always be availble.

We have a planned release date in mid-June, so keep your eyes open.  If you are one of our testers, a hardy THANKS!

Hey everyone.  Just wanted to drop a blog to let you all know that we haven't stopped working.  In fact, we are grinding away busier than ever.  What are we working on?  Well, we are going over the entire application and giving ourselves a major face lift.

When we first got started. our focus was on features.  So, we set about making sure we had an application that would be useful first, pretty second.  Well, our core features are up and running very well, so we thought we'd take a step back from some of the more asthetic choices, and try again. 

Interested in the new look?  Here are a couple teasers.

Fear not!  We are not changing or killing any of the features you have come to love.  In fact, as soon as we can get this bit of house-keeping out of the way, it's full steam ahead on our Chemical Management / MSDS module.

Oh, and thanks to our testers who have so graciously given us advice on the new look and feel.

After the initial launch of the Incident Reporting section we spent time working on other parts of the system.  However, as we started circling back and adding the new graphs,  we rubbed our hands together in anticipation of pulling all that data entry together into a powerful cost-justification slam dunk by showing just how much those pesky back injuries were costing!  Then, much to our dismay, we realized we hadn't added a section to capture direct losses in an incident!  And .  So, we whipped up a new tab to the system that allows just that.  It is very much like the Lost Time tab where you can add one or many rows which will allow for more robust reporting later.

Well, once that was done it was time to put that to good use and throw that info into a graph.  The result is maybe the most flexible and light-weight analysis engine ever created for Injury risk management - well...maybe.  Regardless, it's really good stuff and super easy to use.  The key to these will be diligent data entry.  If you don't add the costs associated to your issues, you won't be able to slice and dice on attributes such as Body Part, Injury Type, Loss Type, etc. 

Subscribers should log in now and take a look.  You won't be disappointed.  As you put together that ROI for the three lift tables in Shipping and Receiving, you can whip up a cost graph showing the actual cost of injuries over the last 4 years.  Yeah, I know cost avoidance doesn't always get it done, but it sure does get the juices flowing.

Oh, and one more thing: Not a subscriber yet?  What are you waiting for?  The 30-day Free Trial is still going on so take advantage while you can.  Just sign up and you have instant access to ALL of the features of CoreHSE.com.  That's right, you don't have to talk to anyone, give your credit card, give your phone number, and you won't be hassled while you evaulate.

As promised in our last blog, we were putting the finishing touches on our Index graphing capabilities.  In case you missed it, here is the short version.  Every CoreHSE.com company comes pre-packaged with an index called Hours Worked.  Every month, and for each of your facilities, you can enter the total number of hours worked by your employess.  This is a pretty common way for people to get a sense of the relative number of injuries (or whatever the heck else you wanted to count) in your business.  So, instead of counting how many accidents you have, you can examine how many accidents you have in relation to the number of hours that were worked.  The thinking here is that the performance of your business has an effect on the performance of your safety system.

It's just a short putt then to putting this mentality to work for you when thinking about Energy.  Instead of counting how many injuries you have per hours worked, what if you could examine how many Kilowatt-Hours of electicity you used per Volume of Sales.  Or, put another way, how much should we include in the margin of our parts' prices to cover the cost of the energy required to make them.  This shift, from just paying the bills to comparing the relative cost of the energy we pay for is a huge win for Environment coordinators.  It is often the <ehem> lightbulb needed for our bosses to get behind an aggressive conservation plan.

So, how can CoreHSE.com help you with this type of analysis?  Easy!  In the last blog, and with our last release, we introduced the ability to track energy usage and costs.  Now, we've added the ability to create *custome* indexes (like Sales Volume, or Pounds of Product Produced, or whatever the heck else you think is a good measure of your business) and apply those indexes to monthly and yearly graphs of your energy use.

Let's take a look at a simple example.  Check out the water usage in January.  Looking at the raw data, it appears there was a huge spike in usage - and in fact there was.  However, if we index (divide) each of the month's usage amounts by the hours worked in those months, we can see that January's "relative" usage was way lower compared to the number of people that were working at the time.  What does that mean?  I don't know, but it's very interesting!

Raw Data - No Index

Data Indexed by Hours Worked

This highlights the real power of CoreHSE.com.  Take a very simple task like entering energy information once a month.  It may seem like a trivial addition to a system like this, but the power of your experience combined with industry-leading information presentataion (those pretty graphs above) opens a new world of real-time analysis that spreadsheets and filing cabinets just can't match.

For the past 9 months we’ve been diligently adding features to CoreHSE.com that could be considered heavy on the H and a touch light on the E.  That has now changed.

With our latest release, you can use CoreHSE.com to track Energy/Resources for your facilities.  It is so simple you might have overlooked this opportunity.  With a few clicks you can enter details from your energy bills.  You can even split up the usage by meters. 

Now, let’s stand back a bit and see why in the world you would do such a thing.  Take a look at this graph.

If I were a savvy coordinator, I would look at the above graph and start asking questions like:

• What the heck happened in February?  Did we shut down the well?
• April was pretty good, but January was huge - why is that?
• We have been using less and less of the well water throughout the year - why is that?

And what if you could index these values by the number of hours worked or sales volume (a feature that will be a part of the next release )?  Yeah, right, you get a whole new set of questions.  You can then start asking questions about your businesses impact on your resource usage.  These observations lead to action.  Action leads to improvement.  Improvement leads to competitive edge.

Oh, and these graphs are so sweet.  Just right-click, copy, and you can paste them into any document.  No more grabbing data, pasting into Excel, building a graph, changing the colors....buh lah!  Just click and you are done.