Table of Contents
By Phil Molé, MPH
Welcome to the latest installment in our AI and EHS blog series! Here’s a recap of what we’ve covered so far:
- Post one — we provided a general overview of the topic, introducing it to EHS pros curious to learn more about the ways AI can support their life’s work of keeping people safe.
- Post two — we took a closer look at machine learning (ML) and its relevance to EHS professionals like you.
- Post three — we discussed why AI offers a generational opportunity to improve EHS management, focusing on its ability to help quickly assess and control major safety risks.
- Post four — we focused on why speed matters in EHS management, and how AI specifically delivers better risk insights, faster.
- Post five — we focused on how AI can facilitate detection of potential for severe injuries and fatalities (PSIF) risks lurking within the details of incident reports for less serious incidents, like near misses.
In the latest post, we’ll continue talking about specific use cases for AI in EHS management, this time focusing on how AI helps you to improve one of your key risk assessment tools – job safety analysis (JSA).
What is Job Safety Analysis (JSA)?
First, a little background on JSA is in order.
JSA is a type of risk assessment widely used by EHS professionals and recommended by safety and health agencies such as OSHA. Unlike incident investigations, which take place after employees have done the work and after an accident happened, you complete JSAs before anyone conducts the associated work.
When you conduct a JSA, you break a job down into constituent tasks to make it easier to identify and assess risks, since there are fewer places for risks to “hide.” JSAs also provide a great opportunity for engaging plant floor employees in the risk assessment process, which builds better buy-in to your safety programs and results in more accurate risk information.
In short, the advantages of JSAs are that:
1) By breaking a job down into constituent tasks as a precursor to identifying risks, you leave less room for those risks to “hide”; and
2) By directly involving your people in the process, you not only improve engagement, but also get better hazard and risk information from the frontline workers who understand them best.
Why Do EHS Professionals Struggle with JSAs?
Despite the advantages of JSAs, EHS professionals don’t always capitalize on them, because of variability in the JSA process itself, and failure to provide a high enough level of detail in the assessment.
Additionally, not everyone is knowledgeable about every job type, machinery type and procedure, and therefore people completing the JSA may miss hazards and the controls needed to reduce risk.
How Does AI Improve JSAs?
with AI/ML capabilities and improve your JSA output. For example, an ML-powered description analyzer will give your descriptions a “strength” rating and, when applicable, provide recommendations for improvement. If your job task description mentions a ladder, for instance, the AI will prompt you to include the ladder height, an important detail for understanding the level of risk.
Once AI helps you firm up your description, it can then also help you use that description to conduct better hazard evaluation. Then, using the identified hazards based on the description, AI can provide you with a ranked list of applicable controls along with a justification for the control. Since there are many different controls, you can theoretically use for hazards, this ranking process helps cut through the paralysis of too many choices by giving a list prioritized based on the subject matter expertise of real EHS professionals. You can even get recommendations for controls that aren’t currently in your controls library, which will help you improve your operational risk maturity and more effectively reduce potential for significant injuries.
Putting it all together, AI/ML enabled JSA software gives you a consistent process for doing JSAs that gives more accurate results, helping you actually use the JSAs to reduce risks. The ease of use also helps bring all of your people into the JSA process, improving engagement and harnessing the knowledge of the workers most familiar with the job and its hazards.
Looking for More Information on AI and EHS?
Stay tuned for future installments of our AI and EHS blog series, where you’ll learn more about AI, specific use cases for AI in EHS management, considerations when evaluating EHS software and vendors, and more!
In the meantime, you can visit our AI Glossary & Learning Hub to continue learning on your own. There, you’ll find a curated list of resources covering various aspects of AI and EHS, as well as definitions of common terms.
We also invite you to download and read our new white paper, “Why EHS Professionals Can’t Afford to Ignore AI.” You’ll get a deep dive into all of the reasons why EHS pros like you have a generational opportunity to use AI to pivot from a reactive safety management approach to a proactive approach that reduces injury rates and fosters a positive safety culture. From there, you can also get some guidance on what to look for when selecting an EHS software vendor with AI capabilities with our new AI vendor evaluation checklist.
Let VelocityEHS Help!
If you’re ready to jump to the part about how Velocity can help, we’re standing by to talk!
Our recently launched AI Hazard Analyzer & AI Controls Recommendations in our JSA software give you guidance to instantly assess job descriptions, identify hazards, and get tailored control recommendations. Vēlo, powered by VelocityAI, supplements your expertise so you can improve your JSA quality, consistency, and efficiency without slowing down.
Our VelocityAI-enhanced capabilities in our software portfolio also include AI PSIF Insights to help you identify less obvious serious risks within your incident descriptions. VelocityAI also can help you improve root cause analysis, strengthen incident descriptions, make better controls selections in ergonomics assessments, and auto-process contractor documents like OSHA logs and certificates of insurance. And that’s just the beginning.
In fact, why not see for yourself how we can help? Get in touch today to set up a meeting so you can see our software in action!