Operational Risk

Using contractors offers many benefits. You can offset labor costs, increase operational flexibility, and get quick access to highly-skilled workers, to name a few, but managing these contractors also creates challenges. It often involves extra administrative work and adds increased levels of uncertainty as to whether the people working at your site possess the training, […]

What is Control of Work? When contractors lack the proper qualifications, the results can be catastrophic, leading to serious accidents or fatalities. Control of Work is a system of safety management that acts as a gate for your workplace, mitigating risks by verifying the contractor’s documentation before they are allowed on-site. This proactive approach ensures […]

The ideal scenario for any professional ergonomist starting an ergonomics process is to assess a set list of jobs that are “cyclical”, or take place on a consistent, regimented schedule within a controlled facility. Creating a plan for completing baseline risk assessments and allowing that data to guide all your improvement decisions is always easy […]

Risks come at us from all sides, and it can be a real challenge to gain a comprehensive understanding of how those risks interact with one another and impact your business. If you’re relying solely on spreadsheets or simple risk registers to document and track risk assessment findings, it can feel all but impossible to […]

By Phil Molé On November 1 through 5, 2021 the Society for Chemical Hazard Communication (SCHC) hosted their Fall Meeting with OSHA officials to bring stakeholders up-to-speed on the proposed changes to OSHA’s Hazard Communication Standard (HazCom) published by OSHA earlier in 2021. Janet Carter, Senior Health Scientist at USDOL/OSHA, and Sven J. Rundman III, Supervisory Industrial […]

by Phil Molé Welcome to the fifth and final installment of our “Bowtie Analysis Blog” series. Today, we’ll wrap the series by talking about how risk bowties enable a more active and holistic risk management framework that’s integrated with layers of protection analysis (LOPA) and critical controls verification. It’s OK if you haven’t read our […]

by Phil Molé VelocityEHS recently presented the webinar “Major Chemical Safety Incidents- A Review of Common Causes” with EHS Today. The webinar reviewed investigations of major chemical incidents by the Chemical Safety Board (CSB), looking into the details of each for takeaways about common failings of risk management, and how we can address them. In […]

Welcome to the fourth installment of our “Bowtie Analysis Blog” series. In our first installment, we talked about the usefulness of risk bowties for training employees on workplace risks, our second installment explored the way they can pull together information from many different types of assessments, and our third post discussed how bowties help visualize and manage risk […]

Welcome to the third installment of our “Bowtie Analysis Blog” series. In our first installment, we talked about the usefulness of risk bowties for training employees on workplace risks, and our second installment explored the way risk bowties can pull together information from many different types of assessments. In this post, we’ll be looking at […]

When you don’t know how to do something, it’s usually best to defer to the experts and let them take care of it. But what if the people you thought to be the experts actually aren’t? What if they’re not qualified at all? The Danger of Deference Blindly deferring to another party to solve a problem can create enormous issues that have catastrophic results. This is exactly what happened in Hawaii in 2011. A tragic explosion occurred when five employees […]