I’m glad to share the good news that IIRSM in partnership with Cardinus has designed the control charts as one of the data analysis components of our Decision Support Tool (DST). The control chart is now a built-in feature within DST; these are used to determine if a business process is in a state of statistical control. Control charts are mainly used to monitor the stability of a process, where a process within control charts may either be classified as in control or out of control. Its main features include the data points, a central (mean value), and upper and lower control limits (i.e. UCL and LCL) based on standard deviation, which are used to indicate whether a process output is “within the control limit” or “out of control”. A sample image below shows the graphical representation of a control chart using the number of incidents within “X” organisation over a period of 30 days.

In health and safety and risk management terms, control charts are useful as it helps the decision makers to take a closer look at the number of incidents within their organisation. Its graphical representation helps managers with even less or non-technical background to get more meaningful information out of the stored incident data. This will assist them to identify which incidents are as a result of a failure of health and safety management system.

I will keep you updated in future blogs with more news about DST; please feel free to contact me for any comments/suggestions atshahzeb.malik@iirsm.org.

Dr. Shahzeb Malik, Technical and Research Manager, IIRSM