Incidents happen in all industries, and logistics is no exception. In logistics, there are various types of incidents that are important to report. These include accidents, safety observations, damage reports on vehicles and goods, fraud, hygiene, near misses, initiatives and ideas of improvement, IT security violation, systems failures, claims and more.
Incidents like these are usually reported using incident reporting forms. Read on to learn more about these forms and what they should include.
The Essentials
If you are just familiarising yourself with incident reporting forms and what to include in them, here are 6 essential main components to remember in a good incident report form:
- The form should specify when and where the incident took place.
- It should indicate the name of the person reporting the incident. It should also include the names of their supervisor and any other persons who were involved.
- The form should include a field for explanation of what happened before the incident and what the person reporting the incident was doing when it occurred.
- It should include the environmental conditions. For example, the report form should include if the floor of the vehicle was slippery, the road was icy or the lighting was bad.
- The incident report form needs to detail any injuries or losses in numbers.
- The form should include an explanation of how these injuries or losses are treated and the extent of their damage. This section will help the incident investigator when they look into the case and follow up on it.
Follow-up Questions
An ideal incident report form should also have follow-up questions for the person investigating the incident. This will help the incident investigator to analyse and find the root-cause the case. It will help them determine how the incident occurred, as well as why it occurred. This is essential, as it enables the incident investigator to create corrective and preventative actions for the future.
Open Communication
Ideally, incident report forms should be able to facilitate direct communication between the relevant parties. It is essential that the incident investigator can communicate easily with all the parties involved in the incident.
To achieve this, you need to adopt a software system that everyone involved can use at any time and from any device. This will speed up the process, which is essential when you are dealing with potential safety risks and hazards. It will allow the incident investigator to communicate directly with the reporter throughout their analysis of the incident.
Communication will speed up both the initiation of the analysis and the time it takes to conclude the investigation. This is essential because it is recommended that the analysis is initiated no later than 2 days after the incident. It is also best that the investigation is concluded no longer than 14 days after the incident.
Final thoughts
Incident reporting is a necessity for any industry, and for logistics it get especially important as multiple stakeholders are involved in order to deliver a good service to customer. Employee safety is crucial, and to ensure that it's as good as it can be you can implement incident reporting forms to help your people bring important observations and incidents they experience during their daily work. That way you will not only make your people feel safe and looked after, but you will also have a better understanding of what potential risks exists in the chain of delivery so you can take action and preventative measures going forward.
Are you looking for a tool to improve safety at work, incident and efficiency management, feedback, as well as other reactive reporting processes in your organisation? Falcony | Observe ticks all the boxes for low-threshold reporting, analytics and follow-up actions. Is easy to customise, enables real dialogue, anonymous reporting, and a lot more.
We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.
By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
More information at falcony.io.
