Think about all the high-risk jobs that you’ve assessed, and still, there is no way around it: eliminating all risk is impossible. And that’s why Permits to Work, or PtW, exists. PtW doesn’t provide permission to perform a specific task. Rather, it provides a means of communication between employees, supervisors, and managers. A way of verifying each precautionary step, and a formal work procedure that – if followed flawlessly – makes those high-risk jobs much safer.

An extra layer of protection

Having PtWs in place for all the jobs that require, it can be a nightmare to manage without the right tools – more on that later. But imagine not having PtW. An employee has a risky job to do with a long checklist of steps and a complex procedure, but there is no one to formally verify that procedure, so there is no exact clarity, no certainty that the procedure has to happen exactly that way at exactly that time.

Additionally, no matter how experienced the employee is, if they don’t verify on their side that they followed the procedure, how can you be sure that they are as far away from risk as possible? With such jobs that require PtW, each misstep can have dire consequences, and not having all parties communicate clearly about the followed procedures creates a gap of misunderstanding and lack of knowledge that is sure to lead to incidents.

Necessity of clarity

Historically, there have been disasters caused by a lack of PtW procedures, cases in which a single person failed to authorize certain tasks and therefore had employees working on conflicting assignments, or not follow LOTO procedures for example. Think of the sinking of the USS Guitarro and HMS Artemis to name a few. PtW leaves no doubt: clarity and communication are the keywords to safety, and PtW provides that in full.

The only thing that gets in the way of that is using the wrong means: paper permits get lost or damaged. It takes forever to get to the right person to sign off on something. Digitally, without a consolidated platform, chaos can arise just as quickly. Not to mention the chaos when working with contractors who have their own methods.

The right means

Tenforce’s Permits & Isolation module will put you on the right track to making those permits easy to manage both internally and with contractors. Automate everything that is difficult about PtW management: communication to the right people at the right time, verification, conflict tracking, monitoring… With such software, a necessary procedure becomes a routine task instead of an arduous chore.

Just check out our Permits to Work solution and see for yourself – it is one of the most promising on the market. On top, it integrates with the rest of our EHS software suite: Incidents Management, Audits, Management of Change, Shift Management and others.

Try TenForce, we’re sure that we can make a difference.