To stay on top of the most important indicators, practitioners should be able to display them in dashboard form, collected on a single screen with easy-to-read graphics showing accident rates or metrics such as risk assessments not updated, incidents awaiting investigation, progress against targets and actions not closed out.

Having this information at their fingertips without having to run reports frees up practitioners’ time for the more detailed analyses they may need to carry out to explain changes in the data or justify requests to senior leaders for more support.

If the system includes the prompts for those recording incidents to include details of contributing factors then root cause data should be simple to examine, helping the practitioner establish where accident patterns have common contributors such as poor safety communication, inadequate risk assessments, equipment problems or lack of supervision or training.

This kind of analysis can trigger local intervention by the practitioner and site management or can be escalated to senior management where there is a more systemic problem. Trends in these causative factors are also useful indicators of progress in developing a strong safety culture at site, divisional or organizational level.

The system should hold and easily output information on inputs and leading indicators, such as numbers trained and health and wellbeing initiatives, and feedback data from employee surveys.

For an input such as management safety tours, the system should help administer the program, sending automated email reminders to those due to tour sites, but also holding records of who managers talked with, risky or commendable behavior they observed and actions opened as a result.