For most people, making mistakes at work is no big deal. With autosave and undo, just about every error can be fixed. But with some critical tasks, human error can lead to disastrous consequences.
Like when a pilot makes a mistake during flight, or when a nurse administers the wrong medication to a patient. In today's complex and fast-paced work environments, human error can lead to disastrous consequences. Sometimes there is no undo. But it doesn't have to be that potential errors are a constant source of worry, because you can put systems in place to help reduce those errors. That's why pilots have well-designed cockpits and good communication protocols, and why nurses have checklists, procedures, a lot of alarms, alerts, independent checks and safety huddles to try to reduce the risk of error.
Fortunately there's a way to figure out what these critical errors might be and what to do about them, so people get things right the first time. That's where SHERPA comes in, enabling greater peace of mind. Our innovative methodology, which has been applied to aviation, nuclear and medical safety systems, has been developed and refined by Dr. Embry over the last 30 years into a modern, comprehensive platform that helps reduce the risk of human error in critical tasks.
The SHERPA software, which stands for the Systematic Human Error Reduction in Process Analysis, helps provide practical and sustainable solutions for human factors risk management. SHERPA software is designed to serve any organisation that has critical tasks supported by human performance, particularly in high-consequence environments such as oil, gas and chemical plants, pharma and biopharma manufacturing, medical device design, defence, energy production and transportation. At the root of it, Sherpa can help deliver safety, security and confidence that everything is running as it should.
Safety, so people are kept further from harm, so there are no error traps to catch people out, so the task is designed to foster compliance and the workplace is intuitive and user-friendly. Security, so the costs of error are reduced and any waste associated is avoided. Human life and welfare are protected, harm to the environment is avoided.
is avoided and quality and production are maintained. And confidence that you have done all you can to improve the capacity and capability of your staff not only through training but by making sure the systems they use work with them rather than against them. Sherpa Software's main function is to conduct proactive human factors risk assessments helping you take action before things go wrong. Here's a quick step-by-step of how it works.
First, you identify the critical tasks that require examination. You want to focus this work on the tasks that really matter to your organisation. Those that could threaten its survival, cause significant harm. or cost it a lot of money. Second, you conduct an initial task analysis based on your existing procedures and documentation.
This gives you a head start in understanding how the task should be done. And third, you collaborate with the workforce to understand how the work is actually done. You build a hierarchical task analysis, an HTA, to help understand the work, get feedback and come to a consensus about best practice.
Fourth, you identify the critical steps in the HTA. Where are the hotspots that could lead to disastrous consequences if things go wrong? Not all of the task steps will matter.
Some will be more critical than others. So you'll want to focus your error reduction resources on those steps. Fifth, you review different ways that the step could go wrong, examining different failures and their consequences. For example, take a chemical or gas delivery road tanker. What happens if someone forgets to connect the hose or they don't connect it properly?
What happens if they connect it to the wrong connection point? Sixth, you look at the PIFs, the Performance Influencing Factors, that either increase or decrease the likelihood of failure. For example, if the connection points on the truck are not labelled well, or if they're close together and they look the same, this will increase the chance of them being confused. Seventh, you think about the risk reduction measures, measures including interlocks, barriers and improvements to the work environment and procedures. In this example we might separate those connection points, make them look different and label them more clearly.
Fundamentally this is about creating a better system to reduce potential error, not just retraining people and adding further checks into the procedure. In a similar way Sherpa software can be used to improve the quality of the data and the performance of the data. Shurpa software can also be used to improve learning from incidents by reviewing past events and identifying areas for improvements.
So, if you know where the error hotspots are in your tasks, the likelihood of future accidents can be reduced in the most cost-effective manner. In addition, Shurpa software can help organisations to develop risk-aware training to ensure operators have the necessary skills and knowledge to perform critical tasks, based on the expertise acquired during training. All too often, there's a big gap between how tasks are documented in procedures and the way in which they are actually carried out.
Sherpa closely involves experienced operators in the design of the procedures to prevent this problem. Sherpa can help review procedures, identify critical steps and risks, and make instructions easier to understand. Sherpa can also help to develop procedures that are appropriate for the experience of the end user.
such as short checklists or full step-by-step procedures. It can import and revise existing procedures, saving you lots of typing, help review and analyse the task, export new risk-informed procedures to make users aware of the potential error traps and their consequences, and provide clear, easy-to-read formatting, company templates and logos. Furthermore, Sherpa software can support workload analysis to assess whether people are overloaded in normal and abnormal conditions, provide digital procedures enabling better oversight and more flexibility in what people see including access to new media and conduct a link analysis showing how people move around a workspace such as a control room to check layouts and identify any safety issues during a design. One pharma manufacturer who uses Sherpa reduced their error rate by 80% saving them millions of dollars. A medical device designer said Sherpa helped them make their task analysis seven times faster.
And a senior process safety consultant estimated Sherpa helped make their safety critical task analysis 50% faster than using Excel. Sherpa has a full complement of support and training courses To meet your specific needs, so non-specialists can get up to speed and quickly realize the benefits of Sherpa. Maximize productivity, safety and reliability with Sherpa software.
Visit our website and download a Sherpa brochure.