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SOFTWARE AND SAFETY MANAGING ENVIRONMENT, HEALTH & SAFETY COMPLIANCE AT DALRYMPLE BAY COAL TERMINAL A key player in the world’s global coal export market, Dalrymple Bay Coal Terminal (DBCT) reliably exports coal globally and is critical to Australia’s economic prosperity. With an uncompromising dedication to ensuring the safety of staff and the community, DBCT is focussed on ensuring they have a current, comprehensive risk and compliance management system for their safety, health & environment (SH&E) obligations. Given the size and nature of their business, ensuring compliance with obligations is an onerous task. Failure to do so could result in death, prosecution and significant reputational damage. With this in mind, their drivers were: • Capacity to determine and keep obligations current • Ensuring each obligation has an appropriate procedure to facilitate health and safety and ensure compliance • Management concern and site level ownership • Efficient and effective management reporting and operational processes ACHIEVING THE ‘CLOSED LOOP’ To have confidence that everything is being done to deliver the desired outcomes, DBCT recognised that they needed to develop a ‘closed loop system’ for SH&E compliance. Determining the key objective as ensuring site level staff are aware of their SH&E obligations and “own” the tasks associated with effectively managing these risks resulted in the following process: 1. Establish and maintain a SH&E compliance obligations register 2. Develop tasks, workflow and escalations for each obligation 3. Automate workflow and reporting through governance, risk and compliance (GRC) management software 4. Audit procedures against obligations to assess gaps 5. Align and develop procedures for each obligation 6. Incorporate procedures into workflow solution A key driver in choosing this process was DBCT’s need to quickly know, communicate, act and report on their compliance with SH&E obligations. ESTABLISHING A COMPLETE SH&E COMPLIANCE OBLIGATIONS REGISTER Previously DBCT maintained a ‘legislative register’ document with links to acts and regulations. Manual updating risked the register being out-of-date and incomplete, while legislation updates in legal prose increased the risk of misinterpretation. Company lawyers deemed the register inadequate, not confident it demonstrated 106 AUSTRALASIAN MINE SAFETY JOURNAL they had determined their applicable statutory and regulatory obligations. SAI Global was engaged to develop a SH&E compliance obligations register (register) for DBCT. The register lists and summarises DBCT’s legal obligations based on relevant Queensland and Commonwealth Acts, Regulations, Codes of Practice and Australian Standards; and comprises: • Up to 145 obligations based upon well defined business processes • Navigation and Access Framework to acts and regulations, cited codes of practice, cited AS/NZS Standards and sites of regulators and industry bodies and other guidance materials KEEPING THE REGISTER UP TO DATE With up to 1,500 SH&E obligation changes to keep track of annually, DBCT outsourced the responsibility to SAI Global who provide an updated Register monthly to maintain currency and accuracy, ensuring DBCT are always up to date with their latest SH&E compliance obligation requirements. RISK OWNERSHIP & REPORTING DBCT selected SAI Global’s GRC management software to provide a comprehensive enterprise wide tool for monitoring and reporting compliance status and deliver a structured repository of obligations, policies, internal controls and tasks. This allowed DBCT to establish a single integrated compliance framework, enabling them to: • Assign, track and automatically escalate actions • Access a complete SH&E obligations compliance audit trail • Drive a risk focused compliance process, incorporating control self assessments, compliance tasks and remediation of compliance breaches and issues • Have real-time oversight of their compliance position and emerging ‘hot spots’ • Provide readily available, intuitive dashboards and reports to executives and the Board WHERE ARE WE NOW? DBCT now work with a complete and current register, updated regularly by SH&E compliance experts. Each obligation is mapped to relevant business processes and job roles, with actions and responsibilities easily defined for staff at all levels of the business. Integration with SAI Global’s GRC software enables DBCT to assign these actions and responsibilities as tasks to relevant staff; while workflow triggers, escalations, tracking and reporting allows management to stay on top of compliance status and identify emerging issues. Most importantly, a culture of compliance and responsibility for SH&E compliance is established throughout DBCT, with all employees, from site level to senior management, playing an important part in DBCT’s SH&E compliance and risk management program. Ask SAI Global how they can help your business effectively and efficiently manage your SH&E Compliance Obligations. P: 1300 513 107 E: enquiry.asiapac@saiglobal.com