In­ovyn Goes Dig­i­tal to Man­age In­ci­dents and Change. Re­ports an In­ci­dent in Less than 10 Sec­onds

In­ovyn is a vinyl pro­ducer that ranks in top three world­wide. The com­pany has more than 4,300 em­ploy­ees and is ac­tive in ten coun­tries across Eu­rope. Wholly owned by In­eos, one of the world’s largest chem­i­cals com­pa­nies, In­ovyn’s ac­tiv­ity is build­ing a world scale busi­ness that con­tin­ues to serve its cus­tomers and rapidly re­sponds to chang­ing Eu­ro­pean mar­kets. An­nual pro­duc­tion vol­umes are ex­ceed­ing 40 mil­lion tons.

In A Nut­shell

In­ovyn was seek­ing a so­lu­tion that could en­sure work­ers’ safety, ef­fi­cient ac­tion and in­ci­dent track­ing, and com­pli­ance with leg­is­la­tion. They also needed a suit­able sys­tem to man­age changes fol­low­ing a struc­tured method and a well-de­fined process.

Ten­Force’s spe­cial­ists have a very good un­der­stand­ing of the in­dus­try. Dur­ing the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the In­ci­dents Man­age­ment, Ac­tion Man­age­ment and Man­age­ment of Change mod­ules, we did an in­ter­nal au­dit to es­tab­lish the nor­mal processes in our or­ga­ni­za­tion and then Ten­Force took the lead and worked it out.

DIRK GYZELS
HSEQ AND FA­CIL­ITY MAN­AGER IN­OVYN MAN­U­FAC­TUR­ING BEL­GIUM

Af­ter hav­ing de­cided in­ter­nally what were the reg­u­lar processes and work­flows for the or­ga­ni­za­tion, In­ovyn set off adopt­ing Ten­Force In­ci­dents Man­age­ment and Ac­tion Man­age­ment mod­ules. The Man­age­ment of Change mod­ule later in­te­grated nat­u­rally in the sys­tem. In­ovyn’s stake­hold­ers and Ten­Force’s spe­cial­ists worked to­gether to cus­tomize the plat­form based on the client’s needs. Now em­ploy­ees from all lev­els in the com­pany use the mod­ules on a day to day ba­sis, en­joy­ing the ben­e­fits of a mod­ern scal­able EHS plat­form.

A chang­ing world and in­creas­ing de­mands that soon proved to put a strain on teams

Ob­so­lete tools for a mod­ern work­flow

Be­fore adopt­ing Ten­Force, In­ovyn was strug­gling to record in­ci­dents, plan fol­low-up ac­tions and start man­ag­ing changes us­ing ag­ing tools such as hand­writ­ten forms, Ex­cel spread­sheets, sep­a­rate Word doc­u­ments, and Share­Point en­vi­ron­ments. It was a time-con­sum­ing process and op­er­a­tors were hav­ing trou­ble track­ing ac­tiv­i­ties and quickly re­spond­ing to in­ci­dent-re­lated processes.

In­creas­ing load of manda­tory re­port­ing

In the be­gin­ning of their ac­tiv­i­ties, In­ovyn didn’t have too much trou­ble re­port­ing to au­thor­i­ties and gov­ern­ments in their coun­tries of op­er­a­tion. But as soon as the oblig­a­tion to sub­mit re­ports in­creased, the com­pany man­age­ment felt over­whelmed and needed a cen­tral sys­tem for of­fi­cial and tech­ni­cal records, to com­ply with re­quire­ments from ISO, OSHA and other reg­u­la­tory bod­ies. There was a gen­eral state of un­cer­tainty over sat­is­fac­tory EHS com­pli­ance dur­ing au­dits.

In­con­sis­tent col­lab­o­ra­tion

With data scat­tered in emails, pa­per doc­u­ments and ag­ing sys­tems, im­prov­ing data trace­abil­ity and keep­ing a clean au­dit trail was an im­por­tant ne­ces­sity. The need for vis­i­bil­ity of ac­tions was cru­cial and In­ovyn was also strug­gling with get­ting their em­ploy­ees to ad­dress tasks in a timely man­ner and us­ing a com­mon plat­form. There was also a strong de­mand to have an overview of the com­plex­ity of all re­quested and on­go­ing changes.

Adopt­ing a Dig­i­tal En­ter­prise-Wide Sys­tem to Man­age In­ci­dents, Au­dits, Change and Ac­tions

In an ef­fort led by their Op­er­a­tions Man­ager to re­place Ex­cel spread­sheets with a mod­ern dig­i­tal tool, and af­ter ex­plor­ing the mar­ket, In­ovyn found that Ten­Force was the best an­swer to their chal­lenges. In 2012, In­ovyn adopted the In­ci­dents Man­age­ment mod­ule. The up­grade made in­ter­nal and ex­ter­nal au­dits a task eas­ier to han­dle.

Op­er­a­tors be­came able to cap­ture, track, in­ves­ti­gate and re­port in­ci­dents us­ing one en­ter­prise-wide sys­tem, stan­dard­ized dig­i­tal forms and not pen and pa­per. The fol­low-up is very im­por­tant, to solve re­ported in­ci­dents and defin­ing CA­PAs is a Ten­Force fea­ture now help­ing In­ovyn to have bet­ter vis­i­bil­ity of ac­tions and to track the so­lu­tions un­til they are im­ple­mented.

Through­out the im­ple­men­ta­tion process, In­ovyn could bal­ance their in­put with our ad­vice and in­dus­try knowl­edge. Spe­cial­ists from Ten­Force did reg­u­lar check-ups with the de­ci­sion mak­ers from In­ovyn, dur­ing sev­eral face-to-face meet­ings.

Get­ting a com­pre­hen­sive view of ac­tions from var­i­ous sources couldn’t be sim­pler with Ten­Force Ac­tion Man­age­ment. Ac­tions are char­ac­ter­ized by ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘source’, ‘pri­or­ity’, ‘de­part­ment’ etc. One core fea­ture that In­ovyn ap­pre­ci­ates is the in­te­gra­tion with other ac­tiv­ity ar­eas (shift logs, au­dits, main­te­nance tasks, etc.) and the fact that em­ploy­ees can eas­ily ex­port re­ports, based on the se­lected cri­te­ria.

In 2016, the adop­tion of the Man­age­ment of Change (MoC) mod­ule came nat­u­rally and the process of change is much eas­ier than dur­ing the pe­riod when In­ovyn was us­ing a sys­tem only for the en­gi­neer­ing part of their work­flow. First, a light ver­sion of the MoC mod­ule was tested and then a cus­tomized ver­sion of the so­lu­tion was de­vel­oped and set up. The best part was that Ten­Force’s ex­perts in­te­grated the old data­base into the new plat­form and now In­ovyn has every­thing in one place.

In­ovyn chose Ten­Force be­cause our com­pany could eas­ily set up the work­flows the or­ga­ni­za­tion needed. They also liked the flex­i­bil­ity of the screens, as com­pared to the pre­vi­ous rigid sys­tems. Graph­i­cal dash­boards and re­ports pro­vide real-time vis­i­bil­ity into the MoC process, en­abling our client to proac­tively iden­tify and ad­dress gaps, risks, and is­sues. Also, they were happy to see that there is an e-mail sys­tem in­cor­po­rated in our so­lu­tion, which is alert­ing all the peo­ple in­volved, all through the processes or change plans.

The Re­sults Sim­ply Fol­lowed

10 sec­onds to re­port an in­ci­dent or near-miss event

All in­ci­dents and near-misses are now reg­is­tered and noth­ing is for­got­ten. It only takes around 10 sec­onds for an op­er­a­tor to en­ter the nec­es­sary de­tails in the cus­tomized sys­tem. As the forms are op­ti­mized and adapted to the com­pany’s needs, Ten­Force is easy to use at all lev­els in the or­ga­ni­za­tion, af­ter some train­ing with the em­ploy­ees

The fol­low-up of ac­tions has a bet­ter vis­i­bil­ity

In Ten­Force, ac­tions can be tracked and traced us­ing ‘smart lists’ and cre­at­ing and shar­ing them is now eas­ily done at In­ovyn. Af­ter reg­is­ter­ing the in­ci­dents, ac­tions can be de­fined and no­ti­fi­ca­tions are set-up au­to­mat­i­cally. Key op­er­a­tors re­ceive alerts pe­ri­od­i­cally un­til the ac­tions are marked as “done”. Em­ploy­ees also ap­pre­ci­ate the built-in Ex­cel gen­er­a­tor that gen­er­ates re­ports based on real-time data.

The man­age­ment of change is now a seam­less process

MoC re­quests are cre­ated via a check­list that re­flects the im­pact of change on daily processes and pro­duc­tion. Based on these checks, the change is eval­u­ated and the nec­es­sary safety ac­tions can be taken. In­ovyn gains vis­i­bil­ity over all change re­quests through­out the or­ga­ni­za­tion and the em­ploy­ees and the man­age­ment staff are now sure that all steps are fol­lowed through con­fig­urable check­lists. Also, the analy­sis re­ports con­tain trends and sta­tis­tics that help In­ovyn un­der­stand the haz­ard prone ar­eas or processes.