Health, Safety and the Environment - OSHA Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP)

According to the National Safety Council, organizations in the United States spend $142,200,000,000 on unintentional work injuries – the equivalent of 14% of pre-tax corporate profits or 32% of every dollar of corporate dividends paid to stockholders.

The Federal Government has developed programs helping organizations to reduce work injuries while improving profits. For example, OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP) promote effective worksite-based safety and health. Together with OSHA, organizational management and their personnel (i.e., labor) establish cooperative relationships to implement a comprehensive safety and health management system.

Statistical evidence for VPP’s success is impressive. Those implementing VPP have:

• Achieved a lost work day incident rate at least 50% below industry average
• Reduced injury compensation costs by 20%
• Increased the return-on-investment (ROI) by 150%.

In practice, VPP sets performance-based criteria for a managed safety and health system, invites sites to apply and then assesses applicants against these criteria.

OSHA’s verification includes an application review and a rigorous onsite evaluation by a team of OSHA safety and health experts. And OSHA now wants companies to become self compliant and establish voluntary safety programs so OSHA can focus resources on those that have not.

Using BizFlow^® BPM, organizations can streamline and automate many VPP steps such as:

• VPP application submission
• Application review
• Approvals and rejections
• Onsite evaluations
• Worksite analysis
• Safety and Health training
• Hazard prevention and control
• Self assessments
• Rework

With BizFlow^®, organizations will gain greater control over and visibility into VPP initiatives, assessments and reviews. Participants will be held accountable for their work. Actions will be tracked. Management will measure key performance criteria. Training will be verified and logged. And all will have one place to go for monitoring, measurement and archival.

How do you want to automate your business processes? Contact us today.