Risk & Cost Assessment

Risk & Cost Assessment
Expired

Determining where the greatest opportunities and risks lie is essential to cost-effective 24/7 management. CIRCADIAN® provides a comprehensive set of tools to evaluate opportunities and associated risks for 24/7 operations.

There are inherent necessities and considerable business advantages to running your operation at times outside of just the day shift. However, there are also significant downsides and hidden costs that accompany these extended hour operations.

The hidden costs of shiftwork are the result of human physiology and social patterns that are disrupted when employees are asked to work nights, evenings, long, or irregular hours on a regular basis. These social and physiological disruptions are manifested as increased absenteeism, turnover, health care costs, accidents and injuries, and decreased quality and productivity.

Using a deep analysis of key performance indicators, CIRCADIAN® can:

  • Evaluate the extent of excess costs due to shiftwork in your operation (help you cut costs in your operation)
  • Identify solutions for reclaiming the excess costs
  • Propose solutions to existing policies and procedures, union agreements and regulations to promote cost savings
  • Determine the ROI for implementing countermeasures to reduce the costs

CIRCADIAN®  can also help you:

  • Determining the cost benefits of implementing a fatigue risk management system (FRMS) and help with design and implementation
  • Assess the impact that certain policy changes or schedule changes may have on your operating budget
  • Evaluate your current work schedule and benchmark it against your industry

Determining and maintaining optimal staffing and crewing levels is critical to efficiency. Overstaffing is obviously costly -- not just to payroll costs and benefits. It manifests in lackluster performance by under-used employees not fully occupied or engaged by continuous operation.

Conversely, understaffing creates excessive overtime, difficulty with relief coverage and training requirements, and dramatic increases in safety risks from fatigue, absenteeism, and even burnout.

This is how CIRCADIAN®  can help you:

First, CIRCADIAN® will conduct an analysis to determine optimal staffing levels. We readily establish this using a CIRCADIAN® algorithm with a step-by-step analysis of each shift’s essential positions. The staffing algorithm:

  • Provides for shift relief factors (by job classification and/or department) to accommodate vacations, holidays, and other scheduled absences.
  • Extrapolates projections for unscheduled absences and for emergency requirements from historical data; we factor these into the staffing level calculations.

Second, we will develop schedules that meet operational demands yet reduce overtime. This phase also aligns employee shift schedule preferences with staffing requirements.

The Fatigue Risk Assessment (FRA) is a data collection process and policy review used to identify the fatigue risks for your staff. Essentially, an FRA will clarify the current state of fatigue management in your organization, allow you to better understand how fatigue is impacting your staff, and identify fatigue risks that need to be addressed.

An FRA is also the first step in developing a feedback loop for evaluation, modification, and continuous improvement of your fatigue management plan. By collecting key performance indicators (such as overtime levels, errors, incidents, accidents, etc.) during your FRA, you can use that data as a benchmark to compare and evaluate the effectiveness of your fatigue management plan going forward.

An FRA can use the CIRCADIAN® Alertness Simulator (CAS), an innovative, industry-leading software system to identify and manage fatigue risk. Developed through a decade of research and data collected from over 10,000 recorded 24-hour days from shiftwork and transportation employees, an FRA can rapidly analyze fatigue risk from the duty-rest or payroll data for any number of employees.

This is how CIRCADIAN® can help you:

This analysis allows operation managers to develop an effective plan for minimizing fatigue risk. For example, an FRA analysis of one passenger rail operation found significant fatigue levels among certain groups of junior employees. Likewise, an FRA analysis of a commuter rail system identified significant fatigue problems among those working split shifts. As a result of this analysis, both companies were able to target specific measures to reduce fatigue among these populations. A post-program analysis demonstrated the success of these efforts. The FRA can help you:

  • Identify the groups of employees who are most at risk for having fatigue related accidents
  • Develop fatigue management approaches that are customized to address the specific needs of the operation
  • Provide a benchmark of fatigue at your operation compared with others in your industry
  • Measure the impact of work scheduling or rostering interventions in a particular operation
  • Provide an ongoing method for making managers and supervisors accountable for fatigue risk management
  • Provide documentation to safety inspectors and government regulators about the effectiveness of fatigue management initiatives
  • Set industry standards for safety compliance.

CIRCADIAN® specializes in developing and testing products that are designed to improve alertness and reduce fatigue in the 24/7 workplace. CIRCADIAN® researchers work closely with manufacturers in the design, testing, optimization, and validation of products that monitor or improve alertness.

Our mission is not just to test the product, but also to help optimize the product, and provide expert confidential advice on how to solve problems and boost effectiveness. We have extensive experience in evaluating and developing innovative alertness monitoring systems and fatigue countermeasures, and successfully bringing them to market.

This is how CIRCADIAN® can help you:

CIRCADIAN®, in conjunction with Schmalkalden University, offers manufacturers the expert resources they need to optimize their products, validate claims, and position them in the market place. Products tested and developed include:

  • Driver alertness monitors
  • Fitness-for-duty testing devices
  • Fatigue countermeasures for the 24/7 workplace (i.e., Lighting systems)

Fatigue Accident/Incident Causation Testing System (FACTS™)  is an expert web-based system which calculates the probability of whether a person was impaired by fatigue at the time of an accident or incident.

Fatigue does not discriminate and significantly affects every type of 24/7 operation. A mine haul truck operator loses attention; a control room operator fails to recognize a pending safety-critical event; a pilot forgets to trim the flaps on final approach. Incidents, injuries, and costly errors happen daily due to fatigue.

Yet, because there is no biochemical test for fatigue, fatigue tends to be under-reported and overlooked in incident investigations and its true costs--in dollars and lives--are often unknown or ignored.

Have a Question?
Want a Quote?

Find