Aramark Exec Shows How to Use Accident Information to Prevent Injuries

If your front-line managers have just five minutes per day to devote to employee safety, what would you tell them to do? That's the question Aramark Corp.'s director of decision support will help answer.

In the session, Closing the Safety Loop: Driving Actions Based on Data Collection, Andrew Pelcin will outline the process he used at Aramark to uncover reasons for some common injuries. More than determining the causes of specific accidents, it's important to bring all the root cause analyses together to prevent injuries.

"A large percentage of claims and dollars we were paying were in accidents where individuals were slipping on water on the floor," said Pelcin. "In doing the analysis . . . about 20 percent of people said the floor was wet and that was normal. So they were accepting what I would consider a dangerous environment."

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Armed with that information, Pelcin helped change the mind-set of managers and employees: wet floors in dish rooms and kitchens don't have to be the norm. "Now I can prevent an injury. Now I've given them an action to complete," he said. "Keep the floors dry." Although he wouldn't give specific numbers, Pelcin said that one change has saved Aramark a substantial amount of money in workers' comp claims.

3-fold process. Pelcin's session is in the track, Data Analysis, in which speakers will demonstrate how to use commonly generated data to address workers' comp challenges and prevent injuries. The key is to know what data to use and how to use it. Pelcin says it involves three steps:

Collecting and using the right data.
Identifying the problem and the solution.
Telling managers what they need to do to prevent injuries.

For Pelcin, it started with a pile of faxes that were accident investigations. "I needed a system to collect the data," he said. "I'm not a safety expert, but I got safety experts together and asked them what data we would need."

The session will outline several case studies from Aramark and demonstrate how to customize best practices for a company's needs. "We can give you a couple of steps," Pelcin said, "Learn from the pain we went through to figure it out."

The session is especially designed for risk managers who would be able to change the way they gather information as well as look at the information they already have that they can act on now.

"We've gotten phenomenal results," Pelcin said. "They [managers] only have so much time to devote to the safety of their people. They want to know, 'tell me what to do to keep my people safe.' You've got five minutes; this is what we'd like you to do."

Read more at the WorkersComp Forum homepage.

October 21, 2010

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