Looking Forwood to a safer future

FORWOOD’S CRITICAL RISK MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE IS ONE OF THE ONLY SOLUTIONS WITH A PROVEN TRACK RECORD OF SUSTAINABLY ELIMINATING FATALITIES ACROSS 60 COUNTRIES WITH ALL CLIENT COMPANIES.

It might be a hard task to find anyone as passionate about workplace safety as Thorsten Scholz.

As chief technology officer at Forwood Safety, a specialist fatality prevention service provider, Scholz has helped make the company’s critical risk management (CRM) software one of the most trusted in the resources industry.

“Our key focus for CRM is fatality and serious injury prevention in the workplace,” he told Safe To Work. “Everything we do, all of our technology and methodology, our training material and our plans, everything is built to support that one single goal.”

Forwood’s CRM has been designed to provide a laser focus on fatality prevention in the workplace. Through focused checklists and standardised tools, CRM enables everyone to participate in this critical activity across all departments, from contractors to executive management.

“We need to be very clear on what prevents people from serious harm or death,” Scholz said.

“So for someone working at heights, we know there are five critical factors that can lead to death if they are not in place. CRM ensures these are in place, so people will not die performing that specific task.

“Rather than preventing every single minor safety issue, like a hand injury when not wearing gloves, CRM focuses on the critical controls that prevent death.”

Scholz is adamant that every person at a job site should be empowered to easily identify such critical risks in their work area and test that effective critical controls are in place to protect them. With live data on compliance and critical control failures, CRM makes it easy for managers to identify hot spots and act before incidents occur.

“It is crucial that we give people on the frontline the tools to verify and the power to stop work if a critical control is not in place,” Scholz said. “Safety and risk management only works when everyone is involved.”

Not only does Forwood’s CRM give all workers the ability to control their own safety, it does so in a language that is easy to understand. And the numbers speak for themselves.

“No other solution has achieved a sustainable year-on-year fatality free result,” Scholz said.

From 2012–20, International Council on Mining and Metals

(ICMM) member companies that had not implemented Forwood’s CRM suffered 792 workplace fatalities. Forwood member companies that had fully implemented and maintained the CRM Solution during the same period experienced zero fatalities.

Scholz said Forwood’s CRM promotes proper safety practices by not letting workers cut corners.

The CRM approach ensures the required critical controls are in place, but more importantly it requires the operator to test that these controls are effective and that they will work as expected in the event of a failure. This is one fundamental difference in the Forwood approach.

“With CRM, there are multiple checks and balances – one for operators, one for supervisors, one for managers. They all look at different aspects of the work to ensure the critical controls are robust and effective at all levels.

“By doing this, you can be sure that multiple people have checked you have the right equipment for the job, and no one has missed anything.”

Helping mine sites move from reactive to proactive risk management has been of particular importance for Scholz. One of the ways this can be done is through Forwood’s analytical self-service tool known as ‘FAST’.

A data analysis platform, FAST is designed to examine, predict and understand risk data. Comprising of the most advanced fatality analytics on the market, FAST gives users live data on critical control compliance and helps them discover trends.

“CRM comes out of the box with a number of predefined reports and analytical components,” Scholz said. “FAST works with that as a reporting solution.

“With FAST, users can build their own dashboards and metrics, and import data from a survey system to make it seamless.

“It’s basically a self-service reporting capability which empowers you to integrate even further into the ways you’re keeping your workplace safe.

“It’s incredibly user-friendly because one of the biggest issues we have found is that usability plays a big role in how people engage with data – if they don’t know how to use the tools, they either won’t do it right or they won’t do it at all.

“Using FAST, users can interact and query the reports using voice to text and their natural language. This massively improves the end user experience and gets supervisors and managers to where the next potential fatality could occur much quicker and action improvements together with the front-line workers.”

Scholz understands no safety system is perfect, but he’s proud that Forwood’s CRM is as close as it gets.

“The problem we have in safety is that everybody believes they have a silver bullet,” Scholz said. “I believe that what we do at Forwood makes a huge difference, but it’s by no means a silver bullet. It has to work together with other cultural and leadership movements in safety.

“For example, if you do not have good leadership and you do not have supervisors leading by example in the front line when it comes to safety, no safety program can succeed. There is no faster way to disconnect workers from an initiative than if leadership are not following through when improvements are identified.

“Safety and risk management are not new ideas. They have been around for many years. The increased focus on critical control management has shown profound results in the mining industry.”

“CRM should be best practice and, in the mining industry, should be a baseline expectation. If it does not exist on a site, there needs to be more outward pressure to implement systems like CRM.

“It is usually not that people do not want to implement safety systems like CRM, it is that they don’t know about it. So I think the real hurdle we need to overcome is more education around what could happen if you do not put it into practice.

“Mining is a high-risk industry, and we have to do everything in our power to ensure every worker gets home safely. We want everyone to come home to their families every day. When working together we can achieve this goal and make mining a fatality-free workplace.”