To deliver results health and safety must be at the heart of a company’s culture and commitment. ABB is working hard to achieve best practice and demonstrate its continuous drive for improvement
Safety is central to the ABB way of doing things, both for its own people and for everyone whose lives and businesses it touches –suppliers, contractors, customers and the general public. It strives for world-class performance in all areas of safety management and the elimination of all incidents and accidents from its operations.
In pursuit of these goals ABB has adopted the requirements of the Occupational Health & Safety Assessment Series OHSAS 18001 as the framework for all occupational health and safety management systems. The company’s professional in-house team is supported by independent safety advisers who provide guidance, advice, support and training. All staff are actively involved in managing safety performance. Monthly safety forums are held within each business stream. These are backed up by quarterly combined safety groups with volunteer and appointed safety representatives.
EMPLOYEE COMPETENCE
Comprehensive craft, technical and safety training and education programmes are maintained for employees at all levels and locations. The Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) Managing Safety courses provide the foundation for all safety training. These are supported by general rolling and specialist courses. For work on electrical systems, a
comprehensive Competency Based Authorisation (CBA) process is maintained that validates the training, education and experience of everyone involved, leading to specific authorisation to work or operate on HV systems. This ‘Electrical Safety Management’ process and ABB’s compliance is independently reviewed and assessed each year by Lloyds Register on behalf of distribution network operators (DNOs).
RISK MANAGEMENT
The principles of effective risk assessment are right at the heart of management systems throughout the organisation.
ABB’s Electrical Safety Rules for work at high and low voltage are the result of many years of experience within the electrical power industry and all meet the most exacting requirements of the UK’s transmission and distribution operators, both on public and private infrastructures.
The National Inspection Council for Electrical Installation Contractors (NICEIC) and Lloyds Register assess all of our operations for safety, technical and quality standards against the National wiring regulations (BS7671:1992) and the National Electrical Registration Scheme (NERS).
The scope of certification under these schemes permits ABB to provide the full range of installation and maintenance activities on all power systems and at all voltage levels. Lloyds Register and the NICEIC maintain continuous programmes of surveillance, assuring our customers that standards are always maintained at the highest level.
All subcontractors are required to meet high standards of safety management before they can prequalify to work for ABB. A full programme of inspections and audits is maintained by internal and external staff, which, together with all third party audits, provides the basis for management review of compliance with our planned arrangements.
RECENT ACHIEVEMENTS
The St John’s Wood project, a 400kV gas insulated substation for National Grid Transco, has recently achieved 200,000 man hours without any lost time incidents More than 50,000 incident free man hours has been achieved on the Rugeley Power station where ABB is installing a 400/25kV substation to serve the West Coast mainline electrification project On the Norton project the ABB team has exceeded 25,000 incident-free man hours.