Ideagen EHS Essentials takes the best functionality of Ideagen’s segment-leading ProcessMAP solution, following Ideagen’s acquisition of ProcessMAP in October 2022, and packages it into an off-the-shelf product. It has been developed so that SMBs can set up and begin using it within days.

More than half of businesses in the UK and the US are still using paper or basic spreadsheets to manage health and safety, according to research from analyst firm Verdantix.

With the current processes, there’s a concern that opportunities to protect worker health and safety are currently being missed. EHS Essentials will help SMBs by putting the power into the hands of the employees allowing them to easily report incidents or near misses from mobile devices and upload photographs. It uses incident reports to automatically populate statutory reporting forms such as RIDDOR and OSHA and has a comprehensive dashboard so managers can spot risky locations, job roles or shift patterns.

Ben Dorks, CEO of Ideagen explains, “SMBs make up 99.9% of all businesses in the UK and US. To put that into context, collectively these businesses employ around 10m more people than the entire UK population. I don’t think you’ll find a business globally that doesn’t put the safety of its employees and customers high on its list of priorities, but only a small proportion are using technology to make the process easier and more efficient.

“Business leaders do care and do want to embrace technology, but there’s fear around the cost and complexity to implement that maintains the status quo. We need to work harder as a software industry to enable this transition and create technology and solutions that businesses of any size can implement.”

In December 2022, the US Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that a worker died every 101 minutes from a work-related injury. According to the UK’s Health and Safety Executive, 41% of non-fatal injuries in the workplace in 2021/22 were due to slips, trips, or being struck by a moving object. This has an estimated cost to the UK economy of £18.8bn and is preventable with the right visibility of near-miss, or incident reporting.

Jane Murdoch, Chair of the Scottish Chamber of Safety said: “The problem with paper or spreadsheets is the lack of immediate trending and complete overview of incidents or trends, causing a lag on introducing mitigating action.”

“Tracking trends from a number of spreadsheets can be time intensive and there’s a risk of missing data. With paper systems, it’s virtually impossible. At very best these businesses risk not being compliant in their health and safety commitments, at worst, it could lead to a preventable incident.”

Vijay Gudivaka, Senior Vice President for Environment Health and Safety at Ideagen, added: “We strongly believe that all workers, no matter who they are employed by, should return home to their families in the same healthy state as when they left. The size of a business should not be a barrier to safety. We want to make good EHS accessible to all.”

“When we acquired ProcessMAP in October 2022 we said that we wanted to bring together the strengths of the two organisations: ProcessMAP’s exceptional functionality and Ideagen’s global reach and expertise in software solutions for small-to-medium and medium-to-large businesses.”

“By taking the most used parts of our industry-leading ProcessMAP product – such as incident reporting, root cause analysis, training, inspection and audit to name just a few - and packaging it into an off-the-shelf, mobile-compatible solution, we’ve created a product that any business could easily introduce.”