Challenges I experienced on the project

INTRODUCTION

CMC is a construction and civil projects company which provides high quality services throughout the
Country and at a global level. The company has a team of highly skilled professionals with years of
experience civil and construction projects. .

Due to the risksensitivity nature of this project, the Safety requirements are very strict and need to be
complied with. The report below will discuss the challenges and frustrations I have faced as an
appointed Safety Officer on-site. It is broken down into the different aspects of the job.

I have been employed and appointed as a Health and Safety Officer for CMC.
My duties and responsibilities are listed below:
 Develop a HSE Construction System
 Provide support and guidance relating to HSE Compliance Status
 Auditing sub-contractors on their health and safety documentation
 Ensuring that all HSE inspections are conducted
 Conducting incident investigations and setting up and investigation team
 Co-ordinating all emergencies scenarios and related requirements (Drills)
 Attending to HSE site audits (internal & client)
 Developing the Project Risk Profile and Risk Methodology
 Reviewing of risk assessments
 Developing a Project HSE Performance and Measurement Requirements
 Ensure the client safety regulations are complied with
Challenges experienced on Projects and how they were managed

1. Construction Health and Safety - Project Procurement Management.

In terms of projects resource procurement, the project team members identified a cost increase with the projects
HSE material component. The projects site agents were buying materials straight from the suppliers and were
not aware of competitive pricing. Therefore an advanced electronic software system was presented and
implemented to offer a structure and channel of authority for purchase of project materials. The electronic system
allowed the company site agent to place orders with the site administrator, who would then record all the data
with an automatic generated tracking number. The order would then be referred to the project senior site agent,
the quantity surveyor and finally the procurement division. One challenge was to appoint service providers who
didn’t have a proper cash flow in order to provide services on time.

The following competitive HSE Equipment Suppliers were added;

Supplier’s Name BEE Specialization Recommended

1. Ellaton Mining Supplier Yes PPE Yes
2. Safety Shield Products Yes PPE Yes
3. Ryamic Safety Yes PPE Yes
4. KD Mine Suppliers Yes PPE Yes
5. Ellaton Mining Supplier Yes PPE Yes
Figure J:: PPE Suppliers

The above-mentioned suppliers assisted with regards to price benchmarking. Even local suppliers on our
database were referred to companies listed above as reference in order to reduce price manipulation and fixing.

2. Construction Health and Safety - Cost Management

The project was able to hire about local 50 employees, although we incurred extra recruitment costs due to
insufficient skilled or qualified resident in terms of HSE related training. The organization’s conventional way of
capturing the workers hours with wage cards quickly ran out of control resulting in escalated costs and in some
instances theft. Being a responsible Safety Officer, I decided recommend that management must procedure a
clocking system in order to capture the correct Man-Hour worked. The clocking system captured all worker’s
commencement time, knock-off times, absentees and the time which was lost due to unplanned events. The
clocking system assisted in the control of labour related costs by decreasing over-payments, which are often
caused by interpretation error, transcription error, and intentional error. Before the clocking system, a manual
processing added more financial loss as more time for recording and processing was needed. On senior
manager safeguarded that all procurements where within the allowable or were covered by the project contracts
tender costs. This strategy made sure that our procurement financial costs never adversely affected the projects
targeted profit margin.
During the project we failed to report on the Project HSE incident costing which would include direct costs (actual
or estimated) arising from all incidents investigated and recorded for both insured and uninsured. As a Safety
Officer responsible I designed a simple incident costing template as following which was later used in the Close-
out project report.

Type of Incident YEAR MONTH DATE Incident Description

Vehicle Incident _
1. INCIDENT COST
Company Costs Time Taken (hrs) Rate (per Costs
hr)
Provide first aid R 0,00
Transportation to 0 R 0,00 R 0,00
hospital
Immediate lost Employer 0 R 0,00 R 0,00
productivity: (waiting to
resume,
or reduced efficiency e.g. it may
take twice as long to complete,
at the same hourly rate):
Immediate lost Employees 0 R 0,00 R 0,00
productivity: (waiting to
resume,
or reduced efficiency e.g. it may
take twice as long to complete,
at the same hourly rate):
External Costs
Cost of first Aid supplies
& equipments
Cost of Ambulance or 2 R 0,00 R 0,00
Company Vehicle
Other costs
Subtotal R 0,00
Figure K:: HSE Incident Costing

3. Construction Health and Safety - Hazard Identification Management

One challenging issue with regards to hazard identification was process hazards identified. This part seemed to
be too complex for the project team. Due to the area of the project, I couldn’t assess hazard associated with
physical security, on and off site, the project. Another critical part of this project was to get a buy in from the
entire team in terms of understanding and identification of hazards and reporting such hazards to the responsible
supervisor for corrective action. In most cases, some incidents were a result of poor hazard communication.
During an investigation we realised that one root course to injuries was due to poor understanding of hazard
identification and elimination. Therefore we recommended that all Supervisor must attend the Safety Supervisory
Training.
4. Construction Health and Safety - Risk Management

The procedure required that during any changes in process or technology or in the event of incidents, the risk
assessment must be reviewed and controls put in place and that was not sufficiently done due to poor safety
culture. The composition of the risk/impact assessment team was defined with the adequate worker
representation/involvement appropriate to the level of associated risk/impact, but no training was provided. And
the appropriate risk and impact assessments were not sufficiently and properly carried out before all changes
and/or modifications, including but not necessarily limited to product, process, and engineering and
organisational. As such incurred a number of problems due to this.

Therefore, as a team we agreed that all changes must be reported to the Project Manager before implemented.
And a risk assessment must be conducted with a permit. All risk involved to be communicated.

Risk involved with

Change Proposed to the Change approved with
Change communicated
Project Manager risk assessment
and permit issued

Figure L: HSE Incident Costing

5. Construction Health and Safety - Accident or Incident Investigation Management

The most challenging issue with reference to incident/accident investigations was preventative actions. In most
cases, some action were not closed out or completed by the responsible person. Furthermore there was no
formal training provided to other supervisors in order to enhance the strength of identifying underlying HSE
deficiencies. Few environmental incidents were not investigation on time as per the procedure. Incidents
corrective actions were not closed out on time as required by the company’s standard and NOSA CMB
253N/OHSAS 18001.
6. Construction Health and Safety - Legislations and Regulations

In most cases during the project, legal non-compliance were not recorded as such there was no investigation in
order to rectified accordingly. As the responsible Safety Officer I was unable to take into cognisance of
appropriate guidelines and standards, including applicable by-laws or rules. This was due to the local
municipality’s legal database, which was inaccessible on time and outdated. Transition to new legal requirements
was not properly implemented with regards, to timing, resources and cost benefit analysis. There was no formal
training to project senior managers as required by the internal cooperate standard and CMB 253N standard.

7. Construction Health and Safety - Health, Hygiene and Environmental Management

The appointed hygienist, couldn’t provide the report on time for implementation and preventative controls. The
delay was due to a samples which were sent to a third party SANS Approved Laboratory. Most workplace
stressors, before the hygiene survey seemed to be guess work.

Waste management was not properly implemented as required by the National Waste Management Strategy,
which requires that waste must be treated, recycles, re-used before resolving to landfill. Waste Management
equipment’s like bins were provided and informal training was held, although the implementation was improperly
carried out. A recycling action plan was developed and implemented with indicators.

Risk Ratio Calculated.

Project Recycling rate

I. Current Garbage Generation II. Current Recyclables Generation

Quantity of Material Annual Quantity of Material Annual Generation
Collected Generation (tons Collected (lbs/month) (tons per year) Recycling Rate
(lbs/month) per year)
2 215 13 1 840 11 45.4%

Waste diversion rate 2016/2017

Annual diversion rate is 40.11%

Figure M: Waste Indicators

8. Project Communication Management

In this project, a lot of parties were making decisions at time and not all project team members were made aware
about such decisions. We had to correct this by establishing and maintaining a communication procedure, plan
and a chain of command that was approved on by all stakeholders. The chain of command ensured that any
decision is recorded and distributed effectively up or down the project chain. All project team members were
assigned to specific managers that they report directly to, thus to ensure that all stakeholders were informed of
decisions and any new information. Communication was managed in a faster, manageable, traceable and
effective way.

Although language was a barrier throughout the project. Project managers had to develop a protocol as to deal
with different types of communication problems by distributing it to all project team members not directly involved
in the communication chain such as meetings and memos. Even in this case some employees can’t read so,
there was a need for either translation or further explanation.

9. Construction Health and Safety - Emergency Preparedness Management

Testing of emergency plans and review of such emergency plans and revisions where not conducted on time,
mostly in cases where there’s a new change or activity which required emergency rescue. All the drills were not
communicated to the employees for corrective actions and to curb out non-compliance. No smoking areas were
properly identified, demarcated and but not adhered to by employees. Other fire equipment’s were removed
without a proper assessments and communications to employees. Some sub-contractor’s employee were not
formally trained for emergency works like fire fighting, first aid etc.