Safety and Human Factors Specialists Unite to Reduce Human Error Across High Hazard Industries
Following the recent launch of its online Human Factors software solution, Aberdeen’s Salus Technical hosted a webinar alongside industry experts to shed light on the most common mistakes in critical task analysis and how they can be avoided.
Safety critical task analysis (SCTA) is a crucial process designed to predict and understand the role that human error plays in major accidents. Findings from The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in 2019 revealed a reoccurring noncompliance – that there was no formal process in place for SCTA on many of the offshore oil and gas installations which were inspected.
Founder of Salus Technical, David Jamieson, set about developing a solution to support major hazard industries in identifying and managing Human Factors in safety critical tasks, and thereby reduce risks posed by human error. This resulted in the creation of Salus Technical’s Task Analysis software and subsequently, the webinar titled ‘7 Critical Task Analysis Mistakes (and how to avoid them)’ which took place on the 28th of November.
David was joined by Lorraine Braben, Human Factors Consultant, and Andy Brazier, Risk Consultant, to explain the importance of task analysis, outline best practice, and the showcase resources needed to complete task analyses.
Lorraine is a Registered Member of the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors, as well as a chartered Chemical Engineer and a qualified HR professional. She said: “I think people often see task analysis as a burden rather than a tool for improvement, but if you look at it as a way of finding out more about what people do, you'll start to see some of those benefits. As well as dealing with the safety aspects of a task, you can also use Task Analysis to improve things like quality, reliability, productivity - anything that's the focus.”
Andy has a PhD in Human Factors in the process industry and works predominantly with companies in major hazards industries. He shared his opinion on Task Analysis: “One thing I would say about the software and the new way of working thanks to COVID-19 is that it's opened up a lot of opportunities and in some cases, we’re doing task analysis better now because we’ve got people available who can dial in from anywhere.
“For an offshore decommissioning activity which I was facilitating from my home office, we had people in the clients’ head office, and some of the client’s employees joining from home. We had the barge operator working from their office in the Netherlands and people on the barge as well. We would never have had those people all in the room together before.”
Founder and MD of Salus Technical, David Jamieson shared his reasons for creating the software: “The HSE shared a wealth of information with us following a Freedom on Information request, and for this I am grateful. The repeat non-compliances identified in the findings reinforced the need for our team to develop our latest software and for us to share knowledge with industry experts through our recent webinar. We are continually committed to addressing safety challenges within oil and gas, and other high hazard industries, so that future incidents can be prevented.”
The webinar recording can be viewed here:
In November 2020, Salus Technical launched its flagship product, Bowtie Master – designed to help users visualise their risk assessments. Task Analysis software is the second product in their software suite, designed to help human factors specialists. The company now has over 30 customers across six different time zones – it is even being used by environment researchers in the Antarctic.
More information about Task Analysis can be found here: https://taskanalysissoftware.com/
