As vice president overseeing environment, health and safety, Scott Corby never stops looking for ways to improve safety and environmental performance.

This year, he’s emphasizing the renewed use of Aera’s long-time continuous performance tool known as root-cause failure analysis (RCFA). Corby is asking employees to “dig deeper,” ask more “whys” and seek more sustainable solutions to issues, problems or safety incidents.

“We’ve done a great job over the years and have been setting records for safety, but we still had too many people injured last year,” Corby said. “We need to keep stretching to get us to the next level. Finding the cause-and-effect relationship is the path to effective problem-solving.”

Also motivating Corby is a 2017 Aera-wide lifeguarding priority aimed at improving the ability to learn and apply upgraded knowledge to past incidents.

RCFA standard methodology requires discipline and slow, careful steps. It focuses on the problem and its causes before the solutions. It seeks more consistent root-cause identification and relies on standard documentation. It takes corrective actions to prevent reoccurrence. An effective RCFA also reduces reactive, unplanned maintenance and EHS incidents. The process pursues numerous questions, especially a series of “whys?”

“Deeper questions lead to a sustainable solution,” Corby said.

Root-causes typically are found in inadequate procedures, training, quality control and management system, said Industrial Hygiene and Safety Process Manger Joe Bariffi.

“Old-school thinking is that when someone is hurt or a piece of equipment fails, it was a person who is at fault. The worker didn’t do something right,” Bariffi said. “New thinking is that there was a system failure that allowed the person to get hurt.”

For example, a systematic investigation might reveal that an employee slipped and fell in the cafeteria because the flooring was not maintained according to the manufacturer’s recommended practices. That made the floor less slip-resistant. A series of “whys?” discloses that no procedures were in place for how to maintain or clean the floor, nor was a management-of-change process used when it was installed.

“From this simple event, we get a few system corrective actions,” Bariffi noted.

Those include developing a management system to review changes in flooring selection and maintenance prior to installation; developing procedures to clean floor as recommended by the manufacturer; training staff on the new procedure; and auditing the procedure to ensure it is being followed.

“Implementing corrective action plans is the most important step in an RCFA,” said Corby.

This year, EHS auditing will take a closer look at past safety-related incidents to see if the corrective actions that were implemented afterward are still doing their job. “If we can’t see signs today that those corrective measures are alive and healthy, that tells me they’re not sustainable,” Corby said.

With nearly two decades of effective RCFA at Aera, “It’s getting harder each year to gain more ground,” he added. “But we have to keep getting better.”