Automating Health and Safety Systems in the Tank Storage Industry
No one can doubt the critical importance that health and safety plays in the tank storage industry. However, even the most safety-conscious organisations can sometimes feel swamped with the processes and paperwork that surround health and safety good practice. It is no longer enough to operate in a safe manner on a day-today basis; all organizations must now be able to prove their past and current compliance with health and safety regulations.
Permit to Work (PTW) is a good example of a Health and Safety Executive (HSE) requirement that can become onerous to administer, especially for those organisations that raise and store hundreds of permits every year. Paper permits may seem easy to use on the day, but then they have to be stored and accessible in order to support regulatory requirements for the auditing that is part of all health & safety management systems. In the worst case they may be required at a later date to support investigations in the case of an incident.
Organisations with geographically dispersed sites, especially those with locations across multiple countries, can find that accessing and reporting on paper permits at a global level can be almost impossible. In addition, paper permits can be extremely fallible; they have no in-built checks and are frequently improperly filled in, with incorrect, illegible or missing information.
