Signed risk acknowledgments get lost in the emails after signing

A week before the audit

The internal audit is a week away, and the EHS manager is going through last year's contractor jobs. Press maintenance, switchgear inspections, the company that fixed the roof. The site risks went out by email and the contractor sent them back scanned and signed. But to whom? To the supervisor who ordered the job. To purchasing. To a colleague who is now on holiday. One version sits in a binder at the gatehouse, and for another nobody knows whether it ever came back. The search takes days that nobody has in the week before an audit.

This is how EHS managers at the plants we talk to describe it. One of them put it exactly: “right now it's more like risks not being handed over.” They completed the risk acknowledgment, and nobody neglected anything. They just can't show it now.

Risk acknowledgments get lost after signing

Almost every plant we talk to gets a risk acknowledgment signed by its contractors. The contractor receives the site risks, describes the risks of their own job and signs. The trouble only starts afterwards. Each risk acknowledgment travels a different path: in the inbox of whoever ordered the work, as an attachment, as a scan, as paper in an envelope. Every person who orders contractor work is one more place the signed version can end up.

And the audit doesn't want the records fast. It wants them good: signed by both sides, tied to a specific job, in the version of the site risks that applied at the time. If the plant has since added a line and rewritten its risks, an email won't tell you which version the contractor confirmed.

That is why a stricter rule to save every site risk acknowledgment somewhere doesn't help. One process for everyone does: the contractor completes the site risk acknowledgment in one place, regardless of who ordered the work, and the signed version is stored where the EHS manager will find it.

How Model Obaly does it

Suppliers, contractors and auditors arrive at the Model Obaly plant in Opava throughout the day. Every supplier needs a completed site risk acknowledgment. Today they complete it online before they arrive, together with safety training and a signature. A supplier without a valid site risk acknowledgment does not get an active card. For any inspection, the plant has a complete electronic audit trail.

“Contractors and their workers now complete the site risk acknowledgment and sign their safety training before they even enter,” says Pavla Bolacká, H&S Manager at Model Obaly. The Model Obaly case study describes the whole process.

When a binder is enough

Where only a few contractors come each year and one person orders all the work, a binder is enough. The signed version has only one path. A risk acknowledgment starts getting lost where maintenance, energy and production each order work on their own. Often the internal audit is the first to point it out. For one EHS manager, it recommended completing the risk acknowledgment online instead of on paper. At that point a better binder won't help; one path for every risk acknowledgment will.