A Guide to Construction Risk Assessment

Construction risk assessment is a real challenge as part of an Occupational Safety and Health Administration role. There are over 4,500 work related fatalities in the United States every year. So, you would think that the days of pen and paper to manage risk, safety and health are gone? Well, they are for most industries. However, the construction industry has been slow to change towards online digitization. This can be part of the reason why the industry has a poor productivity record. Relying on spreadsheets, pen and paper makes it difficult to keep track of everything. The loss of transparency of the building process happens when all the information required is not accessible all in one place.

In a modern business, using paper to manage business processes and deliverables like risk management reports, material and equipment procurement, scheduling, drawings and plans, as well as equipment logs and daily progress reports is not the most efficient way to manage that side of a construction business. Moving towards digitization, gives the business more consistent, better outcomes. It gives everyone involved transparent access to information sharing. Without this access, all stakeholders can work from a different version of the truth. This can cause misunderstandings, disagreements, mistakes and delays.

Using paper makes it difficult to capture real data for analysis. This can be crucial to your budget, and goods and services procurement. And, it puts the project and your business at risk. In an interconnected world, risk assessment is an area the industry has not yet embraced.

Construction work is high risk, so risk assessments are fundamental to the construction process. While using software to complete online risk assessments should be a normal part of the process, the industry is stuck in the past. Using paper-based methods is time consuming, costly and put the project and your business at greater risk. Surely, you are already busy enough dealing with the day-to-day operations out on the road. Does paperwork get pushed aside for more important things? Risk assessment software can help you remain competitive, and save you money and time. It can value-add to your business.

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