World Day for Safety and Health at Work is a valuable reminder for many businesses to reevaluate their processes and procedures. However, our operations and maintenance work on power generation sites always keep these considerations at the forefront of our minds. These are high-risk environments; our engineers, specialist contractors, or commercial partners frequently work alone for significant portions of their assignments. This makes it essential to have all the right conversations about site safety before they embark on any work.
Standardising our permit-to-work (PTW) processes is one way to ensure that those conversations happen at the right time, that everyone is on the same page, and that any issues are addressed before work begins. With that in mind, we are rolling out a digital system that allows us to create, issue, and manage permits and integrate any electrical isolation requirements.
Paper forms are all well and good—but let’s be honest, they’ve had their day. Going digital makes us far more efficient and ensures all permits are logged and stored for review and compliance. It also means there’s a standard way of working across each site, and the processes I develop at our central office are followed, no matter who’s carrying out—or supervising—the work on any given day. Formalised and centralised health and safety processes like these will become even more important as we continue to grow and the number of sites we manage increases.
I spent a lot of time looking into the best software to automate our permit-to-work processes and ultimately chose Pisys. Like me, this software has its roots in the chemical and offshore sectors. That’s important as I wanted to introduce a task-based risk approach more commonly associated with those industries—and not every piece of PTW software on the market allows you to do this.
The power generation sector tends to prioritise electrical-related risk, which is understandable and logical. But this can mean non-electrical dangers are overshadowed and, in the worst cases, overlooked. I wanted to treat all hazards with equal diligence, so I made the case for adopting a task-based risk approach and then automating the process with Pisys.
In practical terms, this means identifying all the risks associated with each job—not just the electrical ones—and determining how to mitigate them. We consider electrical isolation risks alongside those associated with working at height, using heavy machinery, working in confined spaces, and so forth. It’s a more holistic view, and I think it’s a better fit for an O&M company in the power generation sector.
The software has brought some significant improvements. For example, we can now monitor all jobs and permits from our central control room just by zooming in on a map of the UK, clicking on each site location and viewing current and historical permits.
However, to function optimally, we need to provide it with accurate and up-to-date information. This is why the role of HSEQ Manager is so important, even when companies have access to advanced PTW software. As such, I’ve been working in the background to check all our legal obligations for high-risk site maintenance tasks.
I’ve then written a standard for each in a series of management documents. These management documents set our approach to fulfilling our obligations. However, they also include additional health and safety procedures, responsibilities, due care, and best practice that we expect our staff and service providers to follow beyond statutory legal requirements.
Now signed off by our leadership team, the management documents have been uploaded into the software’s database. It can then automatically generate the relevant PTW forms. These forms include a list of questions that must be answered in line with the terms of our management documents before we grant a permit. It forces engineers to pay closer attention to the PTW forms and ensure they complete them to our specifications.
Our work in this area is an example of how we go beyond what’s required—or what’s traditionally offered by O&M companies—and deliver a safer and more efficient service. It’s more efficient because potential site safety issues are flagged before engineers start work. This prevents delays that can hold up other jobs across the site and means that if we have to shut down a site for maintenance, it’s offline for the shortest possible time.
I hope this gives you an insight into how we translate our high standards into actual site safety. Usually, this isn’t something our customers would know about. But I’m glad to have the opportunity to share some of these inner workings and processes on World Day for Safety and Health at Work.
By Andrew Miller, HSEQ Manager, Statera Energy Operations
