Client in focus

Everything under control at Oc Technologies

TOPdesk for risk management of environmental and safety incidents

Henk Siebers and Ren Weinand of Oc Technologies

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TEXT: POUYAN DADDEH

An employee has cut himself on a machine, a fork lift truck has toppled over or a visitor is feeling unwell from eating the soup in the canteen. These types of calls may not sound familiar to the average TOPdesk user; however, for the employees of the Health, Safety and Environment department at Oc Technologies, such incidents recur daily.

Most TOPdesk consultants are aware that nine out of ten customers will use TOPdesk for their IT and/or Facilities department and, due to our experience in these areas, we never question whether TOPdesk would fit the needs of these departments. However, on occasion, we do hear of clients who use TOPdesk for entirely different purposes. A good example of such a client is the Health, Safety & Environment department at Oc Technologies, a Dutch organization that supplies document management and printing. This department handles calls on accidents and dangerous situations within the organization.

THE PROCESS IS SIMILAR TO THE REGISTRATION AND COMPLETION OF IT-RELATED CALLS

incoming calls and handle them appropriately. In particular, these specialists research the cause of incidents, so that they can advise the organization on taking preventive measures. Risks are calculated by looking at the chance of recurrence, the exposure and the subsequent effects of the incident, tells Henk Siebers, Safety Specialist at Oc Technologies. In addition, the safety specialist will contact any victims to keep track of their recovery. Before the implementation of TOPdesk, the safety specialists worked in an outdated DOS application. When an incident occurred, they would print out a form, fill it in, hand it in and manually import it into the old system. Once Oc started to realize that they could improve this process, they began looking for a new application. Although not the most logical choice at first thought for logging calls for risk management, Oc chose TOPdesk

Minimizing risks
Oc has employed four safety specialists to keep track of

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because other sections of the organization already had a lot of experience with the software and the package generously met all their needs. The process is also very similar to the registration and completion of IT-related calls, explains Ren Weinand, Project Leader during the implementation.

If you aim at less than 10 percent of the calls being risk class 4 or higher, for example, then you will want TOPdesk to display the number of received calls and their corresponding risks. Especially for this purpose, TOPdesk has created optional fields. These are available by default and, if used well, they can expand the information flow and reporting options of TOPdesk considerably. Oc uses approximately 20 optional fields divided over four groups. The details that callers fill in on the form then automatically appear in the right fields.

they do not always log minor incidents, Emergency Response Officers seem to manage more incidents than are actually logged in TOPdesk. Thats a shame, because these are incidents that you can learn from, comments Henk. The most frequent users of TOPdesk are the safety specialists. For them, the biggest advantage is the added efficiency because they no longer have to type out the details of each individual call. Henk explains, Now, I dont spend as much time registering a call, which gives me more time to investigate the cause of the incident. Another significant advantage is the possibility to inform managers and others involved by email, which in turn enables you to save all the correspondence. Prior to the implementation, you would save forms, photos and research reports in large files, while you now have them in digital form. You can now find everything in TOPdesk, including attachments, and managers can look at their departments calls through the Self Service Desk. In this way, they dont have to call or email their colleagues with questions about the status of a call.

How does it work in TOPdesk?

To start with, you need to acquire sufficient details concerning the call such as the location, the items, processes and people. The safety expert should also

COLLEAGUES FIND THE REGISTRATION OF CALLS VIA THE SELF SERVICE DESK EASY AND ACCESSIBLE
establish whether gases have been emitted and what the scale of the damage is. He or she then registers information about the risk, including the most important risk factors and the scale of the risk. To ensure that these details are all included in the call, a special form has been developed for the caller. You could add this information to the request and action fields in TOPdesk, but this will limit your reporting and selection options. Reporting, however, is essential. Especially concerning risk factors and classes, it is important to report on the frequency of certain situations. Once you are aware of this, you can improve your service.

More calls but less pressure

Since 1 December 2009, the safety specialists at Oc have worked solely in TOPdesk and the responses have been positive, according to Henk. Our colleagues have experienced the registration of calls via the Self Service Desk as easy and accessible. And the figures appear to confirm this: after only four months they had already received 55 calls compared to a total 120 calls in 2009. However, not everyone at Oc necessarily thinks to log a call in TOPdesk, even though they are aware of the possibility. Because

Take advantage of optional fields

This implementation has demonstrated that TOPdesk not only supports IT and Facilities customers, but can also be used for risk management. And this is only one of many possibilities for using optional fields in TOPdesk.

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