In order to protect employees or external companies during hazardous work in the company, many things need to be considered, such as risk assessments, deadlines, protective measures, rules, responsible persons and approval processes. Occupational safety officers are faced with the challenge of maintaining an overview and stringently following defined processes. With digital checklists that support multi-stage processes, this is child’s play.
Permits to work are a structuring element of approval and work clearance processes that are required by law for potentially hazardous work. They describe the work to be carried out, where and when it is to be carried out, by whom it is to be carried out and what precautions are to be taken. Only when the preparations have been properly completed and checked and signed by the responsible persons are release and permission slips issued. Work approvals are therefore an important element of occupational safety, involving a large number of people and areas.
It is well known that software tools can support complex processes such as the work approvals described above. Digital checklists have proven to be a neutral, less performance-hungry and intuitive tool for easily distributing work approvals to users, as they are flexible to use.
Digital checklists can be easily distributed to internal and external employees via the (mobile) internet and used by them via a web browser or smartphone app. Once a checklist has been completed, the subsequent approval processes are simple and automated via an email workflow. The person responsible for an area only sees the part of the checklist for which they are responsible and approves “their” items with a digital signature. This takes the complexity out of the process for the individual person.
However, digital checklists are not just a simple way of recording data. The software is also able to map the multi-stage approval and release process for hazardous work 1:1. Functions such as handwritten signatures, reminders by email or app and automatic escalations are supported. This also ensures that once processes have been defined, they are worked through step by step and no step is skipped.
If work approvals are implemented as digital checklists, there are advantages for everyone involved: health and safety officers have an overview of ongoing approval procedures, deadlines, protective measures, etc. via their dashboard. The digital checklists can be used to record hazards, integrate risk assessments and create, check and document protective measures. Responsible persons are defined, reminder e-mails are sent and deadlines are planned. Digital work approvals also ensure reliable and uniform documentation, thereby increasing legal certainty.
With the checklist designer, once trained users can create the checklists themselves without any programming knowledge – the various control element templates are simply dragged and dropped into the document. New and modified checklists are published immediately and are then available to all users. In the app version, the checklists can also be used offline. The recorded information is then synchronized and stored centrally.
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Christoph Schiffer
Sales Team Germanedge