Improving Pallet Mover Safety in the Manufacturing Industry: A Bow-Tie Analysis of Accident Scenarios

Abstract

A Belgian manufacturing company uses pallet movers for internal transport. Despite the company’s efforts to improve occupational safety, accidents with pallet movers remain noteworthy. In order to control occupational accidents, it is crucial to have a clear view of the potential accident scenarios that are present in a company. The bow-tie method is a way to capture and visualize these accident processes in an integrative way. Included in the bow-tie are safety barriers (both technical as organizational and human) and management delivery systems that can intervene in these accident processes. Once bow-ties are composed, they are an excellent point of departure to assign indicators to the safety barriers and management delivery systems in order to control (i.e., prevent or mitigate) accident scenarios. Two types of indicators can be distinguished. Firstly, there are general indicators that are assigned to management delivery systems interrupting multiple accident scenarios, which can yield a higher safety gain (as they intervene in multiple accident scenarios). Secondly, there are scenario-specific indicators targeting one specific accident scenario, which can be valuable as they target a specific problem in the company. For the development of the bow-ties, a multi-method design with the inclusion of different data sources was used, leading to a comprehensive overview. This makes the bow-tie analysis of internal transport with pallet movers transferable to other settings where pallet movers are used for internal transport.

Measuring Safety Culture Using an Integrative Approach: The Development of a Comprehensive Conceptual Framework and an Applied Safety Culture Assessment Instrument

“…The methodology that enables organisations to compose a set of company-specific indicators in order to operationalise the observable sub-domains of safety culture has been elaborated in van Nunen et al [ 127 , 128 ]. The methodology consists of five different steps (see Figure 5 ).…”

“…The first step is the identification of possible accident scenarios within the company. In the articles of van Nunen et al [ 127 , 128 ], the use of the bow-tie method is explained in-depth as a suitable method to make an inventory of possible accident scenarios, taking into account the specific context of an organisation. When using this bow-tie approach, a comprehensive and detailed overview can be composed of possible causes and consequences of potential incidents within a company.…”

Integrating Risk Assessment and Decision‐Making Methods in Analyzing the Dynamics of COVID‐19 Epidemics in Davao City, Mindanao Island, Philippines

“…An example of a risk assessment tool is the bowtie (BT) analysis, which visually presents the risk factors leading to an unwanted event and the impacts that might result from the unwanted event as well as the controls or safety barriers that could be deployed to prevent and mitigate the unwanted event (Culwick, Merry, Clarke, Taraporewalla, & Gibbs, 2016;Van Nunen et al, 2018). The BT analysis can be accompanied by an AcciMap (Forbes, Heitman, & McCulloch, 2020) to highlight the individuals or parties who are responsible for ensuring the reliability of the controls (Tabibzadeh, Stavros, Ashtekar, & Meshkati, 2017).…”

Analysis of a Historical Accident in a Spanish Coal Mine

“…Besides, several studies have revealed that some factors such as environmental conditions with a significant presence of dust, humidity, and falling rocks can act as precursor agents to accidents in underground mining, increasing the incidence and severity of accidents [22,23,24,25,26]. Hence, it is important for the stakeholders involved in the industry to have the proper tools, frameworks, and understanding of the hazards to deal with accident causation and to achieve a proper safety system [7,27].…”