Is it worth jail time, lost productivity and revenue due to taking short-cuts and skipping steps in the implementation of your safe process? This document provides a methodology, with examples, for conducting and implementing a service provider self-assessment program, provides a cost estimate for conducting service provider assessments versus service provider self-assessment, presents an example of assessment tool identification, demonstrates how the self assessment process functions and shows results of the program based on four years of data collection.
Do you have service providers at your workplace? Are you relying on service providers to perform installations or other related tasks? When we began the process of evaluating the service providers for environmental safety and health (ESH) compliance, many lessons were learned. In 2002, we had reduced our internal Lost Restricted Day Case (LRDC) rate from greater than 5 in 1992 to below 1. We were confident; however we could reduce LRDC even more thereby providing a safer workplace. This reduction would only be possible through a buy in to this reduction process by our company's service providers. Although the service provider's injuries do not count on your company log they can impact your workplace by causing injury to employees working in the area. In 2002, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the service industry had a 27.3 percent of Non Fatal Workplace Injuries. This percentage was the highest percent of all groups reviewed. Manufacturing accounted for 23.3 percent of Non Fatal Workplace Injuries. Locally in our facility, we experienced 13 human error events in 2002 and in 2006 this number reduced to 11. There are two contributing factors which we believe led to the reduction in human related events:
implementation of a service provider safety committee, and;
the implementation of a reliability reduction team.
As with all industry it is important to identify a problem, establish a roadmap to correct the problem, implement a corrective action plan and verify this plan to ensure your corrective action plan is working. We are no different in this area. In 2002, we identified a need to evaluate service providers performing work within our facility. This task was going to be conducted initially by the Safety Professionals within each site however, there were some potential limitations to this methodology. The first was the amount of time it would take to conduct a thorough review of our service provider program. This process would require us to request safety manuals, OSHA logs, and inquire on the insurance modifier, liability insurance and injury illness reports associated with the work being performed.
