by Shane Henson — May 7, 2012—Mellora, a Norwegian company founded in 2012 by Trond Hansen, a quality system manager, lead auditor, and senior health, safety and environment and quality (HSEQ) advisor, has developed what it says is the world’s first open smartphone application for reporting non-conformance, accidents, near misses and improvement proposals related to safety and quality.
According to Hansen, the HSEQ-app is a tool that increases the likelihood for HSEQ-reporting and thus increases the number of reports, which in turn increases the opportunity for further continuous improvement and preventing unwanted incidents and accidents. Hansen says that this is very important because collection of data related to actual or potential incidents regarding health, safety and environment (HSE) or HSEQ is, at present, challenging and difficult. The result is that important data is not captured and taken hold of, which in turn causes unnecessary incidents that cost the public and the private sector a huge amount of money, and that expose employees to unnecessary risk. He expects his new app will be instrumental in remedying this problem—if people take advantage of it.
Hansen says the idea behind the app is that it will be easy to report, and that everyone will be able to do so quickly and without considering a lot of criteria.
By using an iPhone or a smartphone with Android, every employee can use the “HSEQ” to choose among six different report types. In each different report, one will use the predefined categories, enter descriptive text, and add images documenting the deviation, accident, near miss or preventive proposal.
“It cannot be done any simpler, and that is how it must be: fast and simple,” says Hansen. “The analyzing work will be done by the receiver, perhaps in a complex computer system. This might be a heavy process, but the first reporting process must be easy; if not, the report most likely will never be written.”
The app is available with settings for English, German, Norwegian, Spanish and Portuguese.
