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Streamlining the Action-Tracker Database
A recent visit to a medium-sized engineering company that was not quite at the certification stage revealed an issue that seems to be a regular problem for management system administrators and auditors alike. The company had already established a functioning H&S management system, and were building a separate EMS to address the growing number of environmental issues that required to be managed. I was asked to visit and comment on their progress.
The particular area of concern was that five different procedures were created to address the management of incidents, accidents, near misses, audit findings, and actions arising from HSE meetings including outputs from the management review meetings. Due to the variable terminology used and depending on which documents one was reading, it was difficult to know exactly which ‘action-tracker’ database to add the issue. Even the titles of the databases changed according to which document one was reading. Some action items were loaded onto the wrong database and additionally, not all items had been included on any database at all.
Common sense suggests that the solution would be to merge these databases into one Excel spreadsheet and by tagging different entries with one of 4 or 5 options, the system would be searchable for each category. Further developments, such as linking the entry to an action completion target date, a description of the action, a responsible person and a date actually completed would be an entirely natural development. For many organisations who operate an EMS, this function is undertaken with varying degrees of effectiveness. But there are a surprising number of EMS administrators who just don’t seem to buy into this level of simplicity.
The company in question had a paper-based audit reporting and corrective action system that relied on the auditors waiting for feedback to enable them to hand write the response on the sheet. This situation arose because auditors didn’t have access to a company laptop. Several other companies that I know have their EMS on a server and strangely have decided to use the hard-copy paper system for tracking audit findings. The problem with that approach these days, is that the monitoring and effective close-out of the issues identified is less likely to happen, and can be extremely ineffective. For the company in question, the management review action ‘system’ relied on post-meeting updates to a Word file containing the agenda and minutes and this was updated at irregular intervals, by the HSE manager. It became a matter of luck that the action item identified at the annual meeting was completed.
For companies with a significant amount of applicable environmental regulation, the absence of a proper action-tracking database could be critical as the lost or forgotten item could easily result in prosecution for failure to address a particular legal issue that was identified by the company but not acted upon in a timely manner.
John Marsden (FIEMA)
info@marsden-international.com
John is an independent management system auditor who works for a number of international certification bodies.
