370% Increase in Near Miss Reporting at LBC Tank Terminals

LBC Tank Terminals (LBC), is an independent operator of midstream and downstream bulk liquid storage facilities for chemicals, oils and refined petroleum products. Headquartered in Belgium, the enterprise has facilities across Europe and the US, serving over 300 customers.

LBC strives to give customers the safest, most reliable and efficient tank storage possible whilst ensuring there is no such thing as a dangerous product in their care.

The operator aims to provide a safe working environment and a culture with safety at its core. The LBC motto “Always Safe Never Sorry” accompanies their steadfast belief that all fatalities and occupational injuries are preventable.

LBC's strong commitment to a safe work environment led to the organization winning the Signal Mutual Indemnity Associate Safety Leader award for 2017/2018 in the Marine Terminals category, and a Verdantix 2019 EHS Innovation Award for their successes with Pro-Sapien.

“This EHS Innovation Award recognizes the teamwork between LBC and Pro-Sapien to develop a custom-made HSSEQ platform that is aligned with our five Core Values and our Corporate Social Responsibility Policy.
The platform facilitates the reporting of incidents and safety observations and manages improvement actions. Further, it plays a vital role in our learning-from-incidents process as all information regarding incidents and pro-active safety reports are transparent and visible for everyone in the organization. I truly believe that this tool has helped us removing a silo mentality and creating a ‘one-LBC’ organization.”
– Martin Hoogenraad, CSR Manager, LBC Tank Terminals

Challenge

To complement LBC’s new integrated and holistic approach to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) across the global company, the team fired up an innovative HSE technology project.

The new approach consisted of LBC’s five Core Values reflected in an HSSEQ software solution:

Responsibility
Transparency
Respect
Integrity
Empowerment

This meant removing the traditional silo mentality of addressing HSSEQ as a separate department, instead realizing that root causes of HSSEQ incidents may be the same contributing factors as in non-HSSEQ incidents.

Furthermore, LBC wanted to focus on proactive reporting: capturing potential incidents as well as actual incidents.

To achieve this complete vision, LBC required a flexible and user-friendly software solution that also supported non-HSSEQ functions.

The new software would replace an outdated Oracle-based system, which required one FTE to administer and only around three staff per site were trained to use it.

“LBC takes a holistic approach to risk management. We implemented Pro-Sapien as part of this approach and have improved employee engagement [in safety] ever since. Not only that, we are now proactively capturing a broader spectrum of risks covering all aspects of Corporate Social Responsibility throughout the company.”
– Allison Volbeda-Newell, Group Corporate Social Responsibility Director, LBC Tank Terminals

Aims

After a thorough selection process, LBC integrated Pro-Sapien’s EHS software on SharePoint 2016 and Office 365. To meet the project aims, LBC and Pro-Sapien successfully implemented functionality for:

A fully customized Incident Report form
Action Management
Incident Management
PEER Safety Observation
Monthly Return
Management of Change
Business Intelligence (dashboards and reports)

In 2019, the LBC CSR team adopted Power BI, Microsoft’s business analytics service. Pro-Sapien was then able to convert what had been amCharts in the system into Power BI visualizations, giving LBC more flexibility to create and share new reports internally or with clients.

What had taken one full day to achieve prior to Pro-Sapien is now processed much more quickly by leveraging Power BI’s automation features.

“The fact that LBC won a Verdantix EHS Innovation Award makes me immensely proud of our team that worked and continue to work on the project. On top of the positive feedback we’ve had from LBC, the external recognition motivates us to be even more innovative with creating new features for our users and buyers.”
– Reza Hosseinzadeh, Developer, Pro-Sapien

Results

With the implementation of Pro-Sapien, all employees can now report Incidents and Near Misses straight from the LBC SharePoint.

For instance, employees use their existing login details – single sign on – to access Pro-Sapien. This boosts user adoption and eliminates the need to learn a new software system. Furthermore, due to the intuitive, SharePoint-based user interface, less training is required to onboard new users.

As a result, non-HSSEQ staff now feel comfortable reporting Incidents, Near Misses and potentially Unsafe Conditions. Since the deployment of Pro-Sapien, the share of Incident Reports logged by non-HSSEQ staff rose from a mere 10% to 93% compared to the year before.

Moreover, Near Misses and Unsafe Situations Reports increased by 370%.

Further results LBC is experiencing include:

One day each month saved in running HSSEQ reports
Eliminating Excel spreadsheets for Action lists (Pro-Sapien Action Manager is used instead)
Faster responses to non-compliance issues
Site Managers running their own HSSEQ reports for a deeper understanding of HSSEQ on their site
Increased user engagement by aligning Incident Reporting with Safety Training
Reduction in training times for new EHS software users

With a more integrated and user-friendly HSSEQ software system, LBC has exemplified their holistic approach to safety and CSR. The global company will continue to monitor and improve performance at terminals whilst partnering with Pro-Sapien to further enhance the management solution.

“The focus on actively tracking proactive reporting and assigning risk treatment measures using the Action Manager makes LBC an even safer and more rewarding place to work.”
– Allison Volbeda-Newell, Group Corporate Social Responsibility Director, LBC Tank Terminals