Risk Measurement

Here we discuss Risk Measurement and Assessment. These are part of Risk Management which is a very large discipline and topic. There are so many aspects to it that it would be impossible for us to do it justice. However, our products and services are used by contractors and the concept of ‘Risk’ is extremely important for them. What we provide is a “Monitoring function” in a full classical risk management situation. Ideally, the goal of risk management is to reduce risk and thereby improve profit. Again ideally, the data from monitoring will help for a number of reasons.

Here is the risk that our clients face: Cleaning and security contractors provide labour so as to make an area or a facility clean and safe. Failing to provide that labour can result in costly “Events” such as slip and trip injury, break ins, damage to facilities and other injuries. In some cases, the costs associated with these events can be significant; tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and often costly litigation. We believe that it is possible to perform a “Risk Assessment and Measurement” that will help identify work practices that lead to increased risk.

In all cases there is the possibility that the timely provision of labour would have either eliminated the event or would have at least reduced its frequency.

It has been proven time and again that the timely provision of labour will reduce incidents such as slip and trip injury and damage or other such events.

This article deals with trying to assess and measure risk for the above situations and applications of our products.

History. June 2018 – This article is a work in progress. It represents new innovations by Elite-ID. You are invited to return from time to time as this is developed and expanded into the Nexus-WebEye system. We believe the concepts and techniques outlined here represent a signficant and unique value-adding service.

What Is the Single Most Important Thing We Can Do?

Easy. Assign one person in an organization to be responsible for checking that data is coming in as it should and that the data is good.

The time taken will be small. We have a lot of automated reports.

They can use our knowledge base to quickly understand any issues they come across.

They can call us and we are happy to help them with everything.

This is what our most successful clients all do.

Latent Risk

We define Latent Risk as “The risk that a particular location may present, all other things being equal, to an event happening.”

It is a probability indicator; the greater the Latent Risk, the more often an event would be likely to happen. It is probabaly a different definition to others – but for our clients it is accurate. Something happens on a site, it happens at a location. There is a possibility of it happening, that is a risk.

For example – in a shopping center some locations have low latent risk so slip and trip injury is unlikely. It may still happen, and over time it will happen but comparatively rarely. A high latent risk location would be expected to have many more slip and trip injuries in the same period of time. We see this regularly in our dealings with clients.

This is an important foundation for assessing risk.

Assessing Risk Areas

All areas are different. There are a number of factors in assessing and measuring risk.

From what we have experienced and from our dealings with clients, here is a summary;

• Risk has a strong random element. An event truly can happen anywhere and at any time.
• However there are locations with higher risk. Often substantially higher. It may well be that 20% of your locations represent 80% or more of the events that happen.
• Time of day, day of week, and other factors may all affect the latent risk.
  • For example near midday on a busy Thursday or Friday, more patrons mean more risk quite often.
• Weather is a factor.
• What happens at a location can be a good indicator. There may be pre-cursors to a worst case event.
  • For example, smoke precedes fire so detecting smoke early will prevent the fire. Knowing that and tracking the number of times it happens will help identify locations with higher risk – even though the full event (a fire) did not happen. This may be common knowledge, but is it? Is it tracked?
• History is your best indicator. If there have been many incidents in an area, then it must be a high risk area – for whatever reason. It may be counter-intuitive, but history is your best indicator.

So, after considering the above points, it is likely that the Latent Risk that an area (in WebEye this is a location) presents will be able to be assessed as high or medium, or low.

Measuring Risk

From the assessment of risk, it should be clear that some locations require special consideration. If these in particular are ignored, the risk of an event significantly and rapidly rises. Therefore it is essential that such locations are targeted for extra attention. They cannot be allowed to be ignored.

We want to be able to analyze attendance data and then using many factors, to show that ‘these locations present high risk and must be targeted for immediate improvement.’

We believe that to measure risk, you must make an assessment of the location then use staff attendance performance (and other factors) to calculate the risk that the location presents. Using this measurement you can make better management decisions.

Measurement of Risk is not directly available in WebEye at present. It is something we are working on. However we do have some practical suggestions/solutions until this is available.

A Hard and Painful Truth

It would be wonderful if we could state ‘Just buy our products and your risk will evaporate.‘ It won’t!

There are some things you just MUST do:

• Make sure the equipment is actually being used. We hear lots of silly excuses.
• Make it company policy, company culture, that data is collected and uploaded.
• Check the data is accurate to what staff are doing. It is quick and easy. There are plenty of options in WebEye to check.
• Check the data to find problem areas and then manage your staff to correct those problem areas. Again, this is easy.

After doing this, you will have reduced your risks. Firstly, the risk of not having the data because of some issue – and secondly, having good data means you have good staffing. Good staffing means you really should have less risk.

Practical Solutions – Standard Functions and Standard Reports

To combat data not being collected or uploaded we have some super easy to use options.

Not having data is a huge risk to you. Without data how can you manage your sites? How can you defend against a slip and trip injury? How can you market your services to your clients?

Please consider these options:

• Insufficient Data notification – use this to email you when data has not been uploaded to your site(s) for a number of daya.
  • This can be super useful in finding sites with beoken WiFi or routers or password problems.
• The Insufficient Logins function will email you when not enough staff have logged in for that day on site.
  • This is great for sites that have a habit of not eveyone logging in.
• Schedule a daily Location Attendance report.
  • We mention this below. It is so good it is worth repeating.
  • This will help with quality of data also.

There are 3 reports in WebEye right now that will help you assess risk resulting from poor staff performance:

• Location Attendance Report – This graphical report shows a spot on a page that represents an attendance at a location and at a time. By looking for signifiant gaps in the report – it is extremely easy to find where attendances are poor and risk will be higher. Huge gaps mean greater risk. Unfortunately this is subjective and does require knowledge of the areas being patrolled. However it is extremely easy to use.
• Risk Management Report – This simplistic report calculates a simple average of the number of minutes between attendances at locations. When this number is lower, it means on average that the location is attended more often. It does not indicate the number or sizes of gaps between attendances so it is limited in its usefulness and accuracy. Similarly it requires knowledge of the areas.
• Location Analysis – Gap Analysis Report – This is a great indicator of risk. It calculates the percentage of time that a location is attended compared with its target. For example, if you achieve 75% it means that for 25% of the time you were NOT attending as required. This means for this 25% of time your risk was elevated and not good. You can also specify a maximum gap in this report so that any locations with attendances greater than this apart will be marked as non-compliant.

Note. These are proprietary reports – invented by and developed by Elite-ID. As such they represent our intellectual property and commitment to our clients.

Use Location Filtering

We strongly suggest you use location Filtering so you can highlight those locations that you want to focus on.

We use the concept of “Tags” – these are just a word or two that you can use to group locations together.

How Is This done?

• You setup tags on locations to group like ones together.
• You select tag(s) at reporting time to select which locations are reported on.

Setting up the tags on your locations is easy:

• In Nexus-WebEye – go to Manage Centers – press the View option for the Center you want to setup.
• In the list of locations, select a location and click the Edit option.
• Scroll down. You’ll see an area called “Tags” – in the input field below that enter a name of the tag that you want to group this location by and then add it.
  • For example “High Risk” or “West Mall” or “Level 1”
  • You can have more than one Tag on a location.
• Press Update when done.

Using Tags for Reporting is easy:

In the report where you setup the date range and center etc, there will usually be an area for entering the tags called “Location Filter”. Just enter the tag there, then press the “Add Tag To Filer” button. You can add multiple tags.

When you run the report, it will only show locations with matching tags.

FAQ – Is It Worthwhile?

We believe so. The cost to determine high risk locations is low. Then the cost of making sure these locations are best-serviced really should also be low. WebEye and automation will help with this – a lot. Scheduled reports are a great way to automate everything.

The pay-back by having fewer costly events may then be significant.

Has this been done before? No. Not in a structured way that we are doing. Usually there is ‘site-knowledge’ where staff know that this location needs to be attended as a priority. But there is no central scheme, no method, no ability to make a measured decision.

Surely it can’t be accurate? It depends on your definition of accuracy. There will be times where no prediction on earth would predict something. We know this. We accept this. However some events can be predicted. It’s all a numbers game – by reducing risk in high risk areas the number of events that cause significant financial cost really should be reduced.

It is too hard to do in the real world? Why? Who said so? Sure, there are lots of things happening that make it difficult. There is the totally random nature of human behaviour but there is also alot of very real cause-and-effect happening.

Our belief is that….Poor performance produces problems.

Our goal is to highlight where poor performance will possibly cause the most problems.

Is This The Best We Can Do?

At present, yes. We have been told by clients that our reports are the best in the industry – and we have a lot of them – and hence they are your best option at present.

WebEye has great features and reports that show you graphically or produce numbers that indicate risk. Location Attendance, Gap Analysis, Compliance Report all produce easily understood results and a risk analysis is easily done using this data.

From this you can assess how your performance has been and then make improvements.

Starting in early 2019, a new system of Risk Assessment and Risk Measurement techniques using a mix of factors has been under development. WebEye has quietly been tailored to support this. These new techniques will be combined into a new reporting suite that will target risk and give far better understanding of staff performance and consequences.

Our goal is to give management better and more easily understood reports that provide accurate data to assist in effective management.