Risk control enhancement using safety climate factors for HIRARC method in steel product industry

Abstract

Accident in manufacturing industry in Malaysia has been high for the last five years. The current strategy of reducing accident by detecting the hazard and do necessary action to the hazard was found to be not enough to prevent accidents in manufacturing industry. The method used for that was Hazard Identification, Risk Assessment, and Risk Control (HIRARC). Meanwhile, safety climate was developed to understand the current condition of safety in the organization. The purpose of this study was to enhance selected risk control in HIRARC method using safety climate factors. The hazards were identified using observation, interview, and analysis of the accident history. Then each hazards were assessed to get the risk score and level. A survey was conducted to get the safety climate result. The safety climate result was subject to Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). From the EFA result, it was found that five factors were safety climate in steel product industry, involving management commitment and actions for safety, worker’s commitment towards safety, priority for safety over production, emergency preparedness in the organization, and safeness in work environment. From analysing the factors, administrative control method was selected to enhance risk control that was already selected by incorporating techniques in administrative control parallel with other type of risk control. In conclusion, factors of safety climate could be used in enhancing the risk control method selected for HIRARC in steel product industry.