On a recent ProcessMAP EHS Leadership Roundtable, we heard from Dennis Seymour, Director of EHS for CTE (Carolina Tractor & Equipment Company). Since 1926, CTE has provided parts, service and sales of construction equipment, power generation, hydraulics, and on-highway trucks. A family-owned business, CTE is part of the Caterpillar dealer network, and operates 8 locations throughout Western North Carolina serving the following industries: Agriculture, Construction, Data Centers, Financial Services, Forestry, Governmental, Healthcare, Landfills, Landscaping, Manufacturing, On-highway Trucking, Paving, Quarries and Aggregates, and Waste. Dennis Seymour has worked as a safety professional for more than 20 years.  He also served in the United States Army for the past 32 years. During his final four years of services, Dennis worked in the Army Safety Center, which dates back to the 1950s. At the beginning, the safety center primarily focused on aircraft accidents. Since then, the center has totally transformed to be the Army Safety Center, which investigates incidents and educates more than 750,000 Army service members around the world who were focused on safety. 

During that time, Dennis became very familiar with a methodology for incident management known as SCAT, which stands for Systemic Cause Analysis Technique. SCAT looks at five predefined categories of loss events, starting with the loss and working backward to the event itself, and ending with causes and control measures to minimize the recurrence of the event. A SCAT diagram is created to outline the five categories.

They are:

•         The Loss
•         Type of Event
•         Immediate Causes
•         Basic Causes
•         Actions to Prevent

There are several ways to evaluate the root cause of an incident, including the “5 Whys”, which is an iterative interrogative technique used to explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem. The primary goal of the technique is to determine the root cause of a problem by repeating the question “Why?”. Each answer forms the basis of the next question. The “five” in the name derives from an anecdotal observation on the number of iterations needed to resolve the problem. The Army also uses the “3 Ws” methodology, which stand for “What happened,” “Why it happened,” and “What are we going to do about it in the future.”

As the Director of EHS for CTE, Dennis continues to use the SCAT Methodology for incident investigation. One important component is to always have a timeline, which should include everything that took place on the day of the incident right up until the time it happened. He also recommends taking as many photos of an incident as possible, as they will be quite helpful in the investigation process for creating a record, as well as in a court of law. Availability of high resolution photos help to reduce uncertainty about reasons that potentially caused an incident. 

The CTE Safety Team always has an after-accident call to go through the SCAT Methodology and ask the questions, what happened, why did it happen and what CTE will do to prevent this type of incident in the future. No matter the size or scope of the incident, the team still goes through the same process for consistency and to be sure they are following the same protocol. The SCAT System looks at the loss event, it goes backwards to what happened leading to the event, it studies what caused the event, and then reviews control measures to minimize recurrence of the loss event.

Over the years since Dennis joined CTE, the safety team has refined its use of the SCAT Methodology and has worked to help change the company culture towards using this process for incident investigation to help get to the root cause of an incident. When the safety team uses the five categories of SCAT Methodology, it studies the loss or incident, the event that led to the incident, the immediate or direct causes of this incident, then it reviews the basic causes, and finally, the lack of control factor, or areas for corrective or preventive action. The SCAT Methodology uncovers areas that need to be fixed, but also the root causes of the incident itself.

ProcessMAP’s integrated incident management solution has played a key role in enabling the CTE safety team to bring the SCAT Methodology to life. ProcessMAP’s incident management solution helps safety teams to collect and normalize incident and investigation data in real-time and perform root-cause-analysis within the solution itself. The centralized EHS solution has streamlined more than 25 different spreadsheets that were in use within the organization. Spreadsheets are often prone to human or system errors, and can have a significantly negative impact on the outcome of an incident investigation. With ProcessMAP’s solutions, CTE is equipped to proactively identify and mitigate risks to minimize the number of safety incidents that impact the employees of the company. 

Of the 47 CAT dealerships in North America, CTE is number one in CAT North America in terms of total recordable incident rate. The business has lowered its auto incidents by 30 percent since implementing the SCAT Methodology.  It has also reduced property damage by 30 percent.  These reductions have positively impacted CTE’s bottom line and have made the company more profitable. 

To learn how ProcessMAP’s EHS solutions can help you streamline your incident management initiatives and minimize safety incidents within your organization, sign up for a free trial today!