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new tools like mobile safety apps helped to further lighten the load on safety professionals by empowering employees to quickly enter their incidents, near misses, audits and perform other essential safety tasks. Safety softftware allows users to generate automated notififications and reports and establish a seamless, standardized workflow process for performing the full range of safety program functions, thereby reducing the amount of manual effort required by safety professionals. This has freed them up to focus their time and effort on more important program goals. Having more of the workforce engaged in the safety process also improves the visibility, appreciation and perceived value of the safety program. Breaking the Status Quo Sadly, our IH profession is lagging far behind. We tend to like our spreadsheets and keep our IH program information tucked away in our black boxes. We fear we cannot empower the workforce through the program because they won’t understand it, and we perform most of our work ourselves or use consultants that only report to us so we can keep a tight hold on the data and the program itself. Even to this day, IH sample data is commonly entered into spreadsheets or worse, still captured and stored on paper. Professional IH associations still often advocate the use of spreadsheets for data collection, so it’s no wonder we have not evolved as our environmental and safety counterparts have. Why are so many people still using spreadsheets? Well, they’re essentially free, involve minimal training to use and are normally quick to get adoption because we’ve been using them for 40 years. ThThere are, however, some big pitfalls that should be considered. Sharing a spreadsheet may be easier now with cloud fifile storage, but they are hard to maintain. ThThere are issues with version controls, security and having a single point of failure if the data becomes incorrectly sorted or corrupted. Even if you add complex formulas, lookups and macros, spreadsheets are at risk for errors from users that could potentially corrupt, invalidate or even destroy years of historic IH data. There are numerous documented cases where companies have lost millions or incurred significant liabilities due to an incorrect formula or from entering incorrect data in spreadsheets. Here are just a few published cases: ■ Public Health England (PHE): Tracking COVID-19. Data was supplied in CSV files, which PHE loaded into Microsoft Excel. The use of an outdated XLS format was limited to 65,000 rows of data. Nearly 16,000 positive test results were lost. ■ Fannie Mae: $1.1 billion error in accounting on a spreadsheet when implementing a new accounting standard. ■ University of Toledo: $2.4 million budget overestimation due to a typo when entering a formula. ■ Kodak: $11M severance error due to a typo on a field that did not have any outlier protection. In most cases, these errors could have been avoided if the The Enduro® Pro HAZ-LO® and USB HAZ-LO® Headlamps With alkaline or rechargeable options, these safety rated, Class 1, Div. 1 Headlamps provide long runtime with both spot and flood options in the same light. Work safely and avoid trip hazards with flexible hands-free lighting from Streamlight. SPOT/FLOOD | ALKALINE & RECHARGEABLE OPTIONS | LOW PROFILE | LIGHTWEIGHT STREAMLIGHT.COM/HAZLO-HEADLAMPS © 2023 STREAMLIGHT, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. www.ohsonline.com APRIL/MAY 2023 | Occupational Health & Safety 15 3/28/23 3:47 PM Untitled-5 1