Risk reduction within companies by a better understanding of safety

Today's industrial companies are faced with increasing requirements to control their human, monetary and environmental losses. The most traditional way to control losses is to survey accidents and losses that have occurred and then allocate resources to reduce the most evident risks. Introduced recently, various risk analysis methods represent the state-of-the-art and may provide a legal precondition to control losses before they occur. Furthermore, safety auditing, parallel to quality audits, is increasingly in use for the evaluation of safety management and loss prevention activities, the main purpose being to verify that activities are conducted according to plans and specifications. The paper presents a critical view regarding each of the three distinct approaches when used separately. It is necessary to combine all the three approaches within one analysis to cover the past and present and even the future risks of a company. The so-called 'Askelma' approach developed by Industrial Insurance has been applied to workers' compensation and more recently to control property losses as well. Askelma is a combination of accident analysis, risk analysis and activity analysis. By using this method, a realistic action plan for further safety improvement and risk reduction within a company can be derived.

Keywords:

• Risk Analysis
• Accident Analysis
• Safety Audit