Lancashire Renewables Ltd is a waste processing and resource recovery provider owned by Lancashire County Council and operating across two sites at Leyland and Thornton. The two recycling plants commenced operations in 2010 and are designed to process up to 600,000 tonnes of municipal waste per annum.
The waste recycling and sorting process, while largely carried out by sophisticated mechanical equipment, also has a reliance on manual operations (for example, hand-picking operations) to ensure standards are met. Such operating environments present unique challenges in terms of workplace safety.
Previously, Lancashire Renewables used a legacy software package which it used for health & safety incident recording. When the company had to upgrade its server operating system, it emerged that the associated upgrade of its H & S software would have involved the purchase of new licences and an implementation project more complex and expensive than was considered viable.
As an alternative, Lancashire Renewables decided to evaluate the EPRAIS Adverse Event Reporting software module, part of a health & safety management suite from industrial software provider Spidex. The company’s two sites had already been using Spidex’s Mainsaver maintenance management software since 2010 and EPRAIS is specifically designed for the two systems to operate side-by-side.
The Adverse Event Reporting module was an immediate success. The ability to log all kinds of incidents, from accidents and near misses through to unsafe working practices and undesired circumstances demonstrated its flexibility.
Once logged, the incident report data can be sorted and analysed in order to identify the top recurring issues and thereby remediate them. Using this ‘continuous improvement’ method, Lancashire Renewables has seen its accident incident rate measurably reduced
As well as helping to engender a safer workplace, the central repository of health & safety data held in EPRAIS has since proved to be an extremely useful resource in fulfilling the company’s FOI obligations.
Following the implementation of Adverse Event Reporting an evaluation of EPRAIS’ Permit-to-Work module is planned.