COMET CEO Mark Rushton recently joined Monica Todorova, Global Customer Marketing Manager and Scott Gaddis, Vice President of Safety and Health at Intelex, for an episode of the Intelex podcast. The conversation covered something we think about a lot: the gap between organisations that collect QHSE data and organisations that actually use it well.
If you work in health, safety, quality or environment, you probably recognise the situation. Years of incidents, audits, inspections and near misses sitting in a system, well organised, consistently captured, and yet the decisions being made week to week still feel more like gut instinct than genuine insight.
That gap is what this conversation gets into.
The data has always been there
One of the threads running through the discussion is that the explosion in QHSE data is not really new. Organisations have been collecting this information for a long time. What has changed is the ability to do something meaningful with it.
Counting incidents is not the same as understanding them. Numbers tell you how many. The context, the pattern, the behaviour behind the number, that is where the real value sits. And for a long time, most of that has stayed buried.
What leadership is starting to expect
Senior leadership teams have learned what data-driven decision-making looks like from finance and operations. Now they expect the same from safety and quality functions.
For a long time, a headline injury rate was enough. If it was down, the room moved on. But that is changing. Leaders are starting to ask harder questions, and QHSE professionals who want a seat at the table need to be ready to answer them with more than a single lagging indicator.
Looking at what goes right, not just what goes wrong
One of the more thought-provoking moments in the conversation comes from Mark's experience with an assurance dataset, tens of thousands of interventions across a large energy company. The compliance rate was over 95%. And yet almost no analysis had been done on why things were going right, only on the small fraction that went wrong.
The assumption that good performance just happens, rather than being driven by identifiable behaviours and conditions, is one that a lot of organisations quietly hold. Better use of data can challenge that assumption and turn it into something you can actually build on.
Want to know more?
Watch the full episode to hear the discussion on why the currency inside a QHSE management system is data in the same way cash drives ERP systems, how analytics can identify the small number of problem areas that cause disproportionate pain, and what it actually takes to pull QHSE data out of spreadsheets and siloed systems into something you can act on.
Learn more about the COMET and Intelex partnership
Learn why a low injury rate at the board level often masks what is actually building in the system
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