Crossrail risk and hazard management system to change future projects 07 November 2012

The hazard and safety management approach applied to the massive £14.8bn London Crossrail project is likely change how future major, world-class infrastructure projects are handled.

So says Alan Moon, head of sales at Comply Serve, which provided its Internet-hosted ComplyPro hazard and safety management system for the project initially back in 2006.

"We have worked hard to consider how the railway will be operated once built, taking into account all functionality that was agreed, right down to the systems now being put in place," says Moon.

Moon makes the point that identifying potential hazards and then effectively mitigating the risks is an essential part of any major infrastructure scheme. Yet tracking hazards and developing an effective workflow that will provide the engineering and safety management evidence required can prove challenging.

That's partly because of the sheer number of people typically involved. Engineering safety managers (ESMs) often use spreadsheets to keep track of progress, but this itself is not without risk.

For large schemes, collaboration between staff is essential to maintain records but it can be difficult to maintain an audit trail where multiple users, in different locations, are sharing a spreadsheet. Important information can easily be lost with a single user's update.

That's why an ESM system safety plan was created and agreed by the infrastructure managers (IMs) at Crossrail, quickly using ComplyPro, to demonstrate that safety risks are as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP).

Initially, design consultants had used spreadsheets to create hazard logs but the scale and growing com,plexity of Crossrail led to a search for a better solution. By turning to ComplyPro to create a central project-wide hazard record (PWHR), it became easier to keep tabs on progress.

Information from the database, for example, is presented in a dashboard offering a colour coded at-a-glance progress report that can be discussed at meetings.

Comply Serve managing director, Steve Tosh says that ComplyPro reduced the risk of crucial information getting lost – for example, by staff overwriting spreadsheet entries or deleting emails necessary to complete hazard records.

The system is designed to allow collaboration between multiple teams but also maintains a single 'source of truth', consisting of the most up to date information, he explains.

"A major advantage of the solution is that it is delivered via the Internet, meaning that clients do not have to install and maintain additional software and the solution can be accessed almost anywhere in the world 24/7, 365," states Tosh.

"This enables easy collaboration right across the supply chain, and delivers a more consistent and reliable view of related information, from a single, always up-to-date, database source," he adds.

Using ComplyPro for hazard reporting has also made it possible to neatly side-step the problem of different companies having their own systems and ways of working, he says.

Because there's no need to install software on the user's computer, providing access as and when another organisation became part of the supply chain proved straightforward. By purchasing licences according to the number of users needing access, Crossrail has been able to scale the solution to meet its requirements.

Also, with elements of the programme constantly being refined, the ability of ComplyPro to log and display the implications of any design changes, following an evaluation of hazards, has proved invaluable, says Tosh.

The high-level view can provide transparency as to other elements and mitigation issues that might exist – and the impact of these – and allow them to be avoided.

Brian Tinham

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