International Journal of Injury Control and Safety

Promotion

ISSN: 1745-7300 (Print) 1745-7319 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/nics20

A preliminary analysis of incident investigation

reports of an integrated steel plant: some
reflection

A. Verma, J. Maiti & V.N. Gaikwad

To cite this article: A. Verma, J. Maiti & V.N. Gaikwad (2017): A preliminary analysis of incident
investigation reports of an integrated steel plant: some reflection, International Journal of Injury
Control and Safety Promotion, DOI: 10.1080/17457300.2017.1416482

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17457300.2017.1416482

Published online: 27 Dec 2017.

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 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INJURY CONTROL AND SAFETY PROMOTION, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/17457300.2017.1416482

A preliminary analysis of incident investigation reports of an integrated steel plant:

some reflection
A. Vermaa, J. Maitia and V.N. Gaikwadb
a
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India; bChief Safety (India and SEA), Tata Steel Limited,
Jamshedpur, India

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

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Large integrated steel plants employ an effective safety management system and gather a significant Received 9 February 2017
amount of safety-related data. This research intends to explore and visualize the rich database to find out Accepted 3 December 2017
the key factors responsible for the occurrences of incidents. The study was carried out on the data in the KEYWORDS
form of investigation reports collected from a steel plant in India. The data were processed and analysed Safety management system;
using some of the quality management tools like Pareto chart, control chart, Ishikawa diagram, etc. safety performance; quality
Analyses showed that causes of incidents differ depending on the activities performed in a department. management tools; incident
For example, fire/explosion and process-related incidents are more common in the departments investigation; safety factors
associated with coke-making and blast furnace. Similar kind of factors were obtained, and
recommendations were provided for their mitigation. Finally, the limitations of the study were discussed,
and the scope of the research works was identified.

1. Introduction Bishop, & Turnbeaugh, 2005). These researchers found the

management commitment as a critical factor in building posi-
World Steel Association (2015) provided a fact sheet about the
tive and favourable safety climate among workers for creating
improvement in the safety performance of steel industries
a safer workspace.
worldwide and quoted that the loss time injury (LTI) frequency
Data collection in the safety field increased after the intro-
rate had gone down from 4.55 in the year 2006 to 1.39 in the
duction of online SMS database. Basso et al. (2004) proposed
year 2014. Continuous effort and commitment from the man-
an incident investigation database system to record factors
agement are accountable for such success but not sufficient to
behind an incident followed by corrective actions which allow
reach zero injury state. Research in safety management is yet to
monitoring the performance of the SMS. Oktem, Wong, and
be explored to its potential and there are lots of issues, scopes
Oktem (2010) proposed a model to design near-miss manage-
and opportunities to develop and structure it. The safety man-
ment system by defining different phases from event identifica-
agement system (SMS) enables organizations to improve their
tion to implementation of the solution to prevent near-misses.
safety performance through continuous improvement. Analy-
Gnoni, Andriulo, Maggio, and Nardone (2013) proposed a
sis of safety data blended with expert opinions can guide deci-
similar type of modelling taking benefit of lean thinking. Safety
sion-makers regarding safety management in the plant.
data come from different sources and are multidimensional.
World Steel Association (2015) has stated that five most
Careful contextualization of all data from various databases
common causes of incidents are moving machinery, fall from
would become a digital asset to any organization. Root cause
heights, falling objects, asphyxiation in confined space or gas
extraction using incident data from the database was studied in
leakage and cranes-related incidents. A questionnaire-based
many industries worldwide, such as: for petrochemical industry
study has been done by Kifle et al. (2014) on three steel indus-
(Cheng, Yao, & Wu, 2013; Nivolianitou, Konstandinidou,
tries of Ethiopia to explore the causal factors to different types
Kiranoudis, & Markatos, 2006), biodiesel industry (Calvo
of work-related injuries in steel-making. Basha and Maiti
Olivares, Rivera, & N un~ez Mc Leod, 2014), ethanol industry
(2013) and Basha and Maiti (2017) tried to find out the rela-
(Calvo Olivares, Rivera, & N un~ez Mc Leod, 2015), mining
tionship among demographic factors, job risk perception and
industry (Sanmiquel, Rossell, & Vintro, 2015), bioenergy pro-
work injury in a steel plant in India using multivariate analysis.
duction (Casson Moreno & Cozzani, 2015), etc. These safety-
In their studies, they found that job risk perception influences
related researches tried to explore the rich database containing
incident occurrence. Some studies have highlighted the issues
valuable information about organizational learning which can
related to the safety culture and climate of steel manufacturing
be utilized to improve the safety performance.
organizations which influence the unsafe attitude and behav-
Many of the steel companies worldwide are storing and
iour of workers (Brown, Willis, & Prussia, 2000; Nordl€of, Wii-
managing incident reports, without analysing them and hence
tavaara, Winblad, Wijk, & Westerling, 2015; Watson, Scott,

CONTACT J. Maiti jhareswar.maiti@gmail.com, jmaiti@iem.iitkgp.ernet.in

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 2 A. VERMA ET AL.
fail to add sufficient value to the learning. Better organization
and analysis of investigation reports can tell about the safety
performance and possible areas of improvement of safety in
any organization. The incident reports not only provide the
type and frequency of incident but also provide information
about the factors and their interactions. This data can be
exploited to know what has happened and what is going to
happen next? However, the main issue of these reports is that
these contain a large quantity of complex information includ-
ing multiple factors causing such incidents. Therefore, investi-
gation of all incidents/accidents is a crucial task for safety
management. However, the extraction of knowledge from inci-
dent reports like how different factors interact with each other
is not an easy task. Hence, it is necessary to visualize all the
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stored information comprehensively so that the management
can identify the most relevant factors and make decisions from
them.
To improve safety, the analyst should figure out the man-
agement needs and concerns at the beginning which will help
him in designing the process and in the choice of models and
methods. Our study focuses on achieving the following goals:

Finding out the frequency of different incident types
(injury, near-miss and property damage) and their pri-
mary causes.

Department-specific analyses to find out their safety per-
formance and responsible factors for incidents, so that
exclusive policy can be made to mitigate them.
To attain the aforementioned goals, a systematic and effi-
cient approach for analysing the textual incident reports using
traditional/conventional statistical tools for visualizing the
effects of factors causing the incident has been provided. This
study helps to integrate the descriptive analytics into an infor-
mation system by answering the following questions in which
a management can be interested:
(1) What kinds of incidents are happening more often?
(2) What are the causes of the incidents?
(3) What kind of injuries are occurring more in number?
(4) Do workers follow the standard operating procedures
(SOPs) while working?
(5) Are the behavioural issues causing an incident?
(6) Which departments are more incidents-prone?
(7) Which department is performing the worst in terms of
safety?
(8) Can the data-capturing process be improved?
Answering the above questions will help in evaluating the
current status and problems at workplaces. This can assist in
identifying the areas for improvement on safety measures. This
can support the safety professionals and administration in fact-
based decision-making for planning, managing, measuring and
learning about safety objectives.
This study starts with briefing the methodology used for the
current research, described in Section 2. Data codification and
study design are given in Section 2.2. Description of data proc-
essing and variables considered for this study is given in
Sections 2.3 and 2.4, respectively. The results obtained and its
insights found are described in Section 3. Discussion of the
results is provided in Section 4. Inferences of the study in terms
of managerial decisions have been discussed in Section 5.
Finally, conclusions and limitations of the study with the future
scope of research are given in Sections 6 and 7, respectively.
2. Methodology
The methodology for analysing steel plant incident reports is
divided into six phases: goal definition, data collection and
study design, data preparation, choice of variables, knowledge
and interpretation. An assumption can be made that by follow-
ing this methodology, the analyst and safety practitioners can
improve the quality of incident data collection, investigation,
analysis and decision-making process. The schematic diagram
of the proposed methodology is shown in Figure 1.
2.1. Description of studied plant
The current study was conducted using incident investigation
data of the iron-making division of an integrated steel plant of
India. The steel plant operates seven days a week, three shifts
per day for the production of steel products. Raw materials are
collected from the raw material-handling plant. Coke is proc-
essed at the coke plant. In the sinter and pellet plant, iron ore
is transformed to a standard size which is suitable to be put
into the blast furnaces (BFs). The limestone, processed coal
and sintered iron ore along with other chemicals are poured
into a BF, where liquid iron is produced. A detailed description
of the studied departments is given as follows:
Dep_1: The raw materials for iron-making are iron ore
(lumps as well as fines), coal and fluxes (limestone,
dolomite, etc.). The Dep_1 processes it (crushing,
washing, etc.) and supplies it to different BFs.
Dep_2, Dep_4: These carry out the process of coke-making
from coal.
Dep_3: This department carries out the activity of sinter-
making, where iron ore is processed to a standard size
which is suitable to be put into the BF.
Dep_5: It takes care of logistics for supplying hot metal
from the BF to the steel-making division.
Dep_6, Dep_7 and Dep_8: BFs are situated in these three
departments. The limestone, processed coal and sin-
tered iron ore along with other chemicals are poured
into a BF where pig iron is produced.
Dep_9: Pellet-making is done in this department.
Iron ore pellets are of spherical shape and are used as
raw material for the BFs.
Other: Small departments performing administrative and
maintenance work are put under this.
Due to the high complexity of work activities, the challenges
faced by the plant are also unique, starting with the conversion
of heterogeneous raw material into a single homogeneous
product. Moreover, another problem is the blend of old and
new technologies running side-by-side with the uneven skill
and age mix of the workforce. The presence of hazardous con-
ditions like high temperature, dust, fumes, vapours, chemicals,
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INJURY CONTROL AND SAFETY PROMOTION
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Figure 1. Descriptive analytics methodology used in this study.
gas and noise makes the employees vulnerable to injury, acci-
dents and health-related problems. This plant has a safety,
health and environment department, which advises and assists
the management in the fulfilment of the obligation concerning
prevention of accidents and maintaining a safe working
environment.
2.2. Data collection and study design
The incident reports were collected from the organization’s
online SMS that is operational in the local network of the orga-
nization. The complete workflow of data generation was briefly
described in our earlier study (Verma, Khan, Maiti, & Krishna,
2014). Incident investigation reports capture different factors
pertaining to an incident like the date of incident, the division
of occurrence, the department of occurrence, the section of
occurrence, incident category, injury type (only for injury
cases), primary causes, brief description of the incident, event
leading to the incident, working condition, machine condition,
observation type, serious process score, injury potential, equip-
ment damage potential, incident type, SOP, etc. Most of the
attributes are categorical and predefined. ‘Brief description of
incident’ and ‘event leading to incident’ attributes give the user
freedom to narrate the incident in their own words. Unfortu-
nately, this section of the report contains misspellings,
3
incomplete information, ambiguity and native language words
or phrases.
The incident data are recorded by using two methods: in the
first method, regular employees of the organization report the
incident by directly logging in the SMS. In the second method,
the contractor supervisors manually report the incident in their
template paper form. Then by e-mail, the soft copy of that partic-
ular incident is sent to the safety manager of that section/subsec-
tion. The corresponding manager then logs the incident in the
online SMS. For this study, the authors extracted the incident
investigation data in Excel format for the period of April 2010–
December 2013 to unfold the root causes behind the incidents.
2.3. Data preparation and pre-processing
Almost 80% time is utilized in pre-processing and preparing
the data in any data mining or machine learning project
(Zhang, Zhang, & Yang, 2003). Data preparation involves vari-
ous issues related to data like missing value, duplicate data
points, spelling error, non-vocabulary words, incomplete infor-
mation, etc. Incident investigation database also has the short-
comings mentioned above. Raw file extracted from the
database in MS Excel format initially had 997 records. Dupli-
cate information rows were removed using the remove dupli-
cate tool of MS Excel itself. Misspelling and irrelevant shorten
 4 A. VERMA ET AL.
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Figure 2. The structure to deal with SOP-related data.
text were removed using MS Excel function and manual
review. After pre-processing, 982 records were considered for
further analysis. For the ease of understanding, some specific
extensions of the data categories were modified. For example,
‘Coke Plant > Coke Ovens’ is part of ‘Coke Plant’ department
only. Therefore, we considered the data as of ‘Coke Plant’
department only. Similar codification was used for other cases,
wherever necessary.
The lack of the following appropriate structure for SOP-
related information has created lot of missing values which are
actually blank spaces (structural zeros). A proper structure was
adopted to avoid those missing values, shown in Figure 2.
2.4. Choice of variables
The investigation reports contain 28 variables and can be cate-
gorized as (1) variables used for identification purposes such as
agency involved, person name, the status of an investigation,
etc., and (2) variables with relevant information about the inci-
dent/accident. The first category of variables is excluded as
they are primarily used for identification purpose. Of the sec-
ond category of variables, some of them were excluded because
of redundancy in information. For example, both ‘brief
description of incident’ and ‘event leading to incident’ give
almost the same information in textual-form narrated by the
employees. Thus, the former one was chosen due to clarity in
the description. Inclusion and exclusion of variables and data-
fields were finally decided after brainstorming with industry
experts. For our study, 12 out of 28 variables have been consid-
ered for analysis. Then, the variables and their categories were
codified. A brief description of the 12 variables along with their
categories is given in Table 1.
3. Results and analyses
Some of the basic quality management tools like a bar chart,
pie chart, Pareto chart, pivot table, control chart and cause–
effect diagram were used to analyse the structured part of the
data; qualitatively and qualitatively to give a clear visualization
of the incidents occurring.
3.1. Distribution of incidents
Figure 3 shows the contribution of different categories of inci-
dent and the types of injuries reported under injury category.
The contribution of injury, near-miss and property damage
incidents are 36%, 30% and 34%, respectively. No injuries get
reported under the category of near-miss and property damage
cases. Under the injury category, six types of injuries were
reported. The definitions of all of these injuries as being fol-
lowed in the plant are given as follows:
(1) Fatal injury: An injury that causes the death of one or
more workers.
(2) Serious injury: An injury that involves permanent loss of
any part of the body, fracture of any bone or joint, per-
manent loss or injury to the sight, hearing or any perma-
nent physical incapacity.
(3) Loss time injury: An injury that leads to time loss from
work of one day/shift or more.
(4) First-aid injury: An injury that involves minor scratches,
burn or cut which requires a single first-aid treatment.
(5) Ex-gratia: An ex-gratia injury is an event when the orga-
nization is prepared to compensate the victims, but not
to admit any legal liability or obligation. Ex-gratia
occurred due to an event, in which the organization was
not involved, i.e. the incident had not happened at the
workplace. Ex-gratia injuries occurred outside the plant.
(6) Medical case: An incident where a worker may feel
uneasy, dizziness, stomach ache or sprain in some body
part while doing the job.
The most reported type of injuries was of the ‘first-aid’-type.
By looking into the data, it was found that ‘ex-gratia’-type
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INJURY CONTROL AND SAFETY PROMOTION 5

Table 1. Description of each variable and the corresponding information fields for each variable.
Sl. No Variables Description Information fields Code Injury Near-miss Property damage Total
1. Incident category (IC) Injury In 355 0 0 355
Near-miss Nm 0 295 0 295
Property damage Pd 0 0 332 332
2. Injury type (IT) Describes the type of injury that Fatal In1 7 NA NA 7
happened to the person involved Serious In2 7 NA NA 7
Loss time injury (LTI) In3 60 NA NA 60
First-aid In4 183 NA NA 183
Exgratia In5 68 NA NA 68
Medical case In6 30 NA NA 30
3. Primary cause (PC) Describes the primary reason at the Dashing/collision PrC1 22 17 54 93
time of incident occurrence Derailment PrC2 1 57 120 178
Energy isolation PrC3 1 9 1 11
Road incident PrC4 88 14 15 117
Slip/trip/fall PrC5 114 24 3 141
Process incidents PrC6 26 30 17 73
Occupational illness PrC7 2 2 0 4
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Material-handling PrC8 25 14 10 49
Equipment machinery damage PrC9 3 5 19 27
Lifting tools tackles PrC10 8 3 1 12
Structural integrity PrC11 4 5 10 19
Working at height PrC12 3 3 0 6
Crane dashing PrC13 1 4 1 6
Electrical flash PrC14 1 3 2 6
Fire/explosion PrC15 5 47 48 100
Gas leakage PrC16 3 15 2 20
Hydraulic/pneumatic PrC17 3 2 4 9
Medical ailment PrC18 11 1 0 12
Rail PrC19 1 8 11 20
Skidding PrC20 22 9 1 32
Toxic chemicals PrC21 1 0 0 1
Hot metals PrC22 7 17 12 36
Run-over PrC23 3 6 1 10
4. Cause class (CC) Describes whether a behaviour or a Behaviour CC1 308 172 246 726
process is responsible for the Process CC2 47 123 86 256
incident occurrence
5. Cause type (CT) Describes whose fault it was that Unsafe act Ct1 138 106 155 399
caused an incident to happen Unsafe act and unsafe condition Ct2 38 34 40 112
Unsafe act by other Ct3 55 17 9 81
Unsafe condition Ct4 124 138 128 390
6. Working condition (WC) What was the working condition at Group working WC1 128 183 224 535
the instance of incident Single working WC2 164 80 83 327
occurrence Blank WC3 63 32 25 120
7. Machine condition (MC) What was the machine condition at Idle MC1 23 15 15 53
the instance of incident Working MC2 30 71 109 210
occurrence Blank MC3 302 209 208 719
8. SOP requirement (SR) Whether SOP is needed for the job Required SR1 138 145 204 487
Not required SR2 47 8 8 63
Not known SR3 170 142 120 432
9. SOP availability (SA) Whether it is applicable or not for Available SA1 128 130 183 441
that job, given that SOP is Not available SA2 10 15 21 46
required Blank Blank 217 150 128 495
10. SOP adequacy (SAd) Whether it is adequate or not for Adequate SAd1 92 93 159 344
that job, given that SOP is Not adequate SAd2 36 35 24 95
required and available Blank Blank 227 165 149 541
11. SOP compliance (SC) Whether it is followed or not for Followed SC1 61 52 65 178
that job, given that SOP is Not followed SC2 67 76 118 261
required, available and adequate Blank Blank 227 167 149 543
12. Brief description Provides a brief description of the (Unstructured or free text)
particular incident as per the
perception of the person logging
into the system.

injury is reported in road incidents outside the plant while
coming to or going from the plant, which is the second most
reported injury. The organization captures and declares the
compensation for ex-gratia as a goodwill gesture. The following
insights can be drawn from this section:

Injury (36%) was reported more in number than near-
misses (30%). The workers and administration seem to be
unaware of the importance of near-miss incident reporting.

Out of 355 injury cases, 51.55% cases are of first-aid-type.
It means that first-aid injuries are more frequent than
other injuries.
3.2. Cause type for incidents
Figure 4 shows that unsafe acts (41%) and unsafe condi-
tions (40%) both contribute almost equally to the reported
incidents. Few incidents were found where the workplace
 6 A. VERMA ET AL.
Figure 3. Distribution of incident data reporting in overall steel plant and types of injuries.
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Figure 4. Different cause types for reported incidents.
condition was unsafe and the workers also followed some
wrong practices resulting in incidents (11%). Very few but
significant amounts of incidents were found in which
unsafe acts by a co-worker were considered to be responsi-
ble for incidents (8%). The following insights can be drawn
from this section:
Figure 5. Year-wise reporting of different incident categories.

Behaviour of workers at the workplace was the dominant
factor for causing incident occurrences.
3.3. Year-wise incident reporting
Figure 5 shows the year-wise incident reporting to find out the
sharing of each incident-type. For the ease of representation,
injury, near-miss and property damage are plotted as stacked col-
umn bar chart. It shows the increase in incident reporting over the
years. The following insights can be observed from this section:

Injury cases were rising every year and in the year 2012, it
got to almost double than that in the previous year.

The sudden drop in near-miss cases reported after the
year 2010 can be noticed.
3.4. Pareto chart for primary cause analysis
With Pareto chart, we tried to find out the prominent primary
causes for incidents, both department-wise and incident cate-
gory-wise. SAS Enterprise software was employed to perform
the task. The most prominent causes of incidents in the overall
iron-making plant are derailment (PrC2) (18.1%), slip/trip/fall
(PrC5) (14.3%), road incident (PrC4) (11.9%), fire/explosion
(PrC15) (10.2%), dashing/collision (PrC1) (9.48%), etc. as
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INJURY CONTROL AND SAFETY PROMOTION
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Figure 6. Primary causes for incidents in overall iron-making plant.
shown in Figure 6. Due to the difference in job-type and the
environment, these primary causes may vary from one another
for different departments. Department (location) -wise order
of primary causes varies such as: derailment (PrC2) (43.5%),
dashing/collision (PrC1) (15.3%), road incident (PrC4)
(11.7%)) for Dep_1 (In = 65, Nm = 50, Pd = 133); fire/explo-
sion (PrC15) (16.6%), slip/trip/fall (PrC5) (16.2%), road inci-
dent (PrC4) (14.0%), process incidents (PrC6) (13.2%),
dashing/collision (PrC1) (10.6%) for Dep_2 (In = 85, Nm = 89,
Pd = 61); road incident (PrC4) (21.8%), fire/explosion (PrC15)
(14.9%), slip/trip/fall (PrC5) (12.9%), material-handling
(PrC8) (7.92%), gas leakage (PrC16) (4.95%) for Dep_3 (In =
45, Nm = 26, Pd = 30); slip/trip/fall (PrC5) (37.3%), fire/explo-
sion (PrC15) (13.7%), process incidents (PrC6) (7.84%), mate-
rial-handling (PrC8) (7.84%) for Dep_4 (In = 61, Nm = 23,
Pd = 18); derailment (PrC2) (50.5%), road incident (PrC4)
(7.69%), process incidents (PrC6) (7.69%) for Dep_5 (In = 23,
Nm = 30, Pd = 38); fire/explosion (PrC15) (20.5%), hot metals
(PrC22) (19.2%), slip/trip/fall (PrC5) (12.8%) for Dep_6 (In =
26, Nm = 35, Pd = 17); hot metals (PrC22) (20.4%), road inci-
dent (PrC4) (16.7%), process incidents (PrC6) (13.0%), dash-
ing/collision (PrC1) (11.1%) for Dep_7 (In = 23, Nm = 13,
Pd = 18); slip/trip/fall (PrC5) (20%), process incidents (PrC6)
(17.1%), road incident (PrC4) (11.4%), material-handling
(PrC8) (11.4%) for Dep_8 (In = 11, Nm = 19, Pd = 5); dash-
ing/collision (PrC1) (32%), road incident (PrC4) (16%), pro-
cess incidents (PrC6) (12%) for Dep_9 (In = 23, Nm = 13,
Pd = 18). Analysis for smaller departments is not presented
here. Same Pareto chart analysis was performed to project the
primary causes behind injury, near-miss and property damage
incidents. The major ‘primary causes’ for injury cases were
slip/trip/fall (PrC5) (32.1%), road incident (PrC4) (24.8%),
process incidents (PrC6) (7.32%), material-handling (PrC8)
(7.04%), etc.; it is also noticeable that derailment (PrC2)
(19.3%), fire/explosion (PrC15) (15.9%), process incidents
(PrC6) (10.2%), slip/trip/fall (PrC5) (8.14%), etc. were major
7
‘primary causes’ in near-miss cases and similarly, derailment
(PrC2) (36.1%), dashing/collision (PrC1) (16.3%), fire/explo-
sion (PrC15) (14.5%), equipment machinery damage (PrC9)
(5.72%), etc. were reported as the primary causes under prop-
erty damage case. Results can also be verified from the cross
table presented in Table 1. The following insights can be
observed from this section:

Slip/trip/fall, dashing/collision and road-related incidents
were observed as the top contributors in almost all
departments.

Fire/explosion, slip/trip/fall and process-related incidents
are more frequent in coke-making (Dep_2, Dep_4) and
BF (Dep_6, Dep_7 and Dep_8) departments.

Derailment comes out as a major cause of incidents in
raw material (Dep_1) and logistics (Dep_5).

Incidents due to hot metal in BF-related departments are
frequent.

Slip/trip/fall, road incidents, process-related incidents and
material-handling are the main contributors to injury.

Derailment, fire/explosion, process incident and slip/trip/
fall are the main causes behind near-miss events.

Derailment, dashing/collision, fire/explosion and equip-
ment/machinery damage come out as the major causes
in property damage cases.
3.5. SOP-related pie chart for incident cases
The pivot table tool of MS Excel was utilized to create a cross
table for handling multidimensional incident reports. It returns
the frequency, grouped by a given set of dimensions (SOP
requirement, SOP availability, SOP adequacy, SOP complied in
our case) with reference to incident occurrences. A pictorial
representation in the form of pie chart is shown in Figure 7. It
was observed that most of the incidents where SOP was not
required or not known were related to road incidents, slip/trip/
 8 A. VERMA ET AL.

Total Injury
SR1 SA1 SAd1 SC1 SR1 SA1 SAd1 SC2 SR1 SA1 SAd1 SC1 SR1 SA1 SAd1 SC2
SR1 SA1 SAd2 SC1 SR1 SA1 SAd2 SC2 SR1 SA1 SAd2 SC1 SR1 SA1 SAd2 SC2
SR1 SA2 (blank) (blank) SR2 (blank) (blank) (blank) SR1 SA2 (blank) (blank) SR2 (blank) (blank) (blank)
SR3 (blank) (blank) (blank) SR3 (blank) (blank) (blank)

12%
13%

14%
44% 48%
22%
5%
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5%
5%
5%
6% 5% 13% 3%

(a) (b)

Near Miss Property Damage

SR1 SA1 SAd1 SC1 SR1 SA1 SAd1 SC2 SR1 SA1 SAd1 SC1 SR1 SA1 SAd1 SC2
SR1 SA1 SAd2 SC1 SR1 SA1 SAd2 SC2 SR1 SA1 SAd2 SC1 SR1 SA1 SAd2 SC2
SR1 SA2 (blank) (blank) SR2 (blank) (blank) (blank) SR1 SA2 (blank) (blank) SR2 (blank) (blank) (blank)
SR3 (blank) (blank) (blank) SR3 (blank) (blank) (blank)

11% 15%

36%

48% 20%

33%
6%
6%
5% 6%
2% 5%
1%
3% 3%

(c) (d)
Figure 7. Incident frequency as found by grouping SOP requirement, availability, adequacy and compliance in (a) the total number of incidents, (b) injury cases, (c) near-
miss cases and (d) property damage cases.

fall or derailment. The following insights can be observed from
this section:

Even after following the available and adequate SOPs,
13% of incidents happened overall. This was also
reflected in 12% of injury, 11% near-miss and 15% prop-
erty damage cases.

Cases, where SOP was required, available and ade-
quate but not followed, were 22% in total, 14% in
injury, 33% in property damage and 20% in near-
misses.

Cases, where SOP was required, available but not ade-
quate were 10% in total, 10% in injury, 8% in property
damage and 12% in near-misses.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INJURY CONTROL AND SAFETY PROMOTION 9
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Figure 8. Cause–effect diagram using primary causes for incident/accident.

3.6. Cause and effect diagram
Few causal factors cannot be captured or analysed by quantita-
tive tools since quantitative analyses are greatly influenced by
the frequency of occurrence. The cause–effect (Ishikawa) dia-
gram (Ishikawa, 1982) provides the logical classification of dif-
ferent causes and their linkage with the consequence. In this
study, the cause–effect diagram tries to capture all the causes
logged as ‘primary cause’. The logical representation of the
causes and the end consequence as an incident (e.g. near-miss,
injury, property damage) is shown in Figure 8. Some of the pri-
mary causes were summed up to particular categories due to
the similarity in incident description. The following insights
can be noticed from the cause–effect diagram:

Incidents due to fire/explosion, gas leakage, toxic chemi-
cal release, hot metal-handling and hydraulic/pneumatic
and process incidents can be categories under a single
entity, called process-related incidents.

Incident descriptions under primary causes like run-over,
road incident and skidding are overlapping. So, it can all
be categorized under road-related incidents.

Incidents reported under rail and derailment causes can
be summed up under rail-related incidents.

Incidents due to lifting tool and equipment/machine
damage can be categorized under tool/equipment, and
smilarly, the incidents reported under occupational ill-
ness and medical ailment can put under ‘illness’.
3.7. Department-wise distribution of incident
Figure 9 shows the frequency of incident reporting in dif-
ferent departments of iron-making plant. The frequency of
reported incidents depends on the number of persons and
the type of activities performed in a particular department.
To know the working culture in different departments,
stacked bar chart was prepared for ‘observation-type’ (e.g.
unsafe act or unsafe condition). Figure 10 shows the percentage
of observation-type for incident occurrences in a particular
department. The following insights can be observed from this
section:

From Figure 9, it can be seen that incidents are more fre-
quent in the raw material department (Dep_1) with the
highest number of property damage cases.

A maximum number of injury incidents have occurred in
the coke-making department (Dep_2).

Near-miss events were reported more than injury, and
property damage cases were only in the coke-making
(Dep_2) and BF (Dep_6, and Dep_8) departments.

140 133

120 Injury Near Miss Property Damage

100 85 89
80 65 61 61
60 50
45
38 35
40
23 26 30 23
30 26 23
18 17 18 19
13 11
20 5 8 7 10 8
3 2
0
DEP_1 DEP_2 DEP_4 DEP_3 DEP_5 DEP_6 DEP_7 DEP_8 DEP_9 Other
Figure 9. Department-wise distribution of different types of incidents.
 10 A. VERMA ET AL.

100%
70 24 4
80% 39 38 34 21
12 125 6 20 15
60% 32 5 9 2
9 19 8 12
40% 15 8 1
27 10 3
52 10 5
134 49 7
20% 34 28
68 11 9 7
0%
DEP_1 DEP_2 DEP_4 DEP_3 DEP_5 DEP_6 DEP_7 DEP_8 DEP_9 Other

Ct1 Ct2 Ct3 Ct4

Figure 10. Distribution of observation-type in different departments.
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Injury cases are reported more than near-miss, and prop-
erty damage cases in the coke-making (Dep_4), sinter-
making (Dep_3) and BF (Dep_7) departments.

Unsafe act is the major cause of incidents in the raw
material (Dep_1), coke-making (Dep_4) and logistics
(Dep_5) departments.

Unsafe condition is the prominent cause of incidents in
the coke-making (Dep_2) and BF (Dep_6, Dep_7, Dep_8
and Dep_9) departments.

Unsafe acts by fellow-workers were also significantly
observed in the sinter-making (Dep_3) and BF (Dep_7)
departments.
3.8. Control chart for measuring safety performance
In this study, a control chart for the number of incidents (NOI)
per month was considered to measure the safety performance
at workplace. The control chart tool, developed by Walter A.
Shewhart (1920), is widely used in quality monitoring of prod-
ucts in manufacturing industries. It can be used to monitor the
safety performance of workplace (Maiti, 2010; Schuh, Camelio,
& Woodall, 2013). The procedure for control chart involves
the (1) computation of upper control limit (UCL), central line
(CL) and lower control limit (LCL), and (2) plotting the inci-
dent frequency against the control limit. If the line graph
resides within LCL and UCL and does not show any trend or
pattern, then the process is called as an in-control process.
NOI generally follows the Poisson distribution (Maiti, 2010).
Assuming the same month-wise Poisson-distribution-based
control charts were prepared, the mathematical expression for
the probability density function and control limits are given as
follows:
mNOI em
f ðNOIÞ ¼
!NOI
pffiffiffiffi
UCL ¼ m þ k m
CL ¼ m
pffiffiffiffi
LCL ¼ m  k m
where m is the mean of the number of incidents and k is the
spread constant.
Here, k is considered as 3 for 99.73% spread mean. Other
values of k can also be considered as per the desired accu-
racy. LCL was considered as zero if the calculated value
comes out be negative for it. The NOI control chart shows
that the system is out of control for almost all incident
types. The LCL value for injury, near-miss and property
damage is taken as zero because in all these cases, the calcu-
lated LCL value was negative. As NOI is a ‘lower-the-
better’-type variable, the NOI value near or higher than
UCL is the worst possible situation. From Figure 11, a
downward trend in the first-half and an upward trend in
the second-half is observed for the total NOI per month.
The control chart for injury cases per month shows an
upward trend (Figure 12) and the control chart for near-
miss events per month shows a downward trend (Figure 13).
This observation indicates that the decrease in near-miss
reporting may be a reason behind the increase in injury
cases. The control chart for property damage shows a ran-
dom trend (Figure 14).
A control chart is also useful for monitoring the safety
performance for some of the departments (Dep_4, Dep_9)
for which the data-points are lesser than the actual data-
set. Hence, to understand the safety performance at depart-
ment-level, the Poisson control chart was analysed to find
out the target where the plant management should focus.
The control limits and the observed trend of control charts
prepared for all the departments are presented in Table 2.
The insights from the Poisson control charts are given as
follows:

Overall injury incidents were trending downward and
near-miss events trend upward. Trend indicates that a
decrease in near-miss reporting might have increased the
injury cases.
(1)
The raw material (Dep_1), coke-making (Dep_2) and BF
(Dep_7) departments were performing poorer in com-
(2) parison to the rest of the departments because many
(3) instances of all types of incidents (e.g. injury, near-miss
(4) and property damage) were found lying outside the UCL.

For Dep_8, most of the injury instances were on LCL but
a sudden jump outside the UCL depicts the under-esti-
mation of safety efforts.
 Downloaded by [Indian Institute of Technology - Kharagpur] at 06:09 30 December 2017

0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40

0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18

0
5
10
15
20
25
30
April April April
May May May
June June June
July July July
August August August

2010

2010

2010
September September September
October October October
November November November
December December December
January January January
February February February
March March March
April April April
May May May

Figure 11. Control chart for the number of incidents per month.
June June June

2011
2011

2011
July July July
August August August
September September September
October October October

Figure 12. Control chart for the number of occurrences of injuries per month.
November November November
December December December
January January January

Figure 13. Control chart for the number of occurrences of near-miss events per month.
February February February
March March March
April April April
May May May
June June June
Total

2012
2012
2012

July July July

CL=6.55
Injury

Near Miss
August August
CL=21.82

August
CL=7.89

September September September

October October October
November November November
December December December
January January January
February February February
March March March
April April April
May May May
June June June

2013
2013
2013

July July July

LCL=0
August August
LCL=0

August
LCL=7.8

September September September

UCL=14.24
UCL=35.83

October October
UCL=16.31

October
November November November
December December December
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INJURY CONTROL AND SAFETY PROMOTION
11
 12 A. VERMA ET AL.

property damage LCL=0

18
CL=7.38 UCL=15.52
16
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0

February

February
September

September

September

February

September
June

June

June

June
December

December

December

December
May

July

May

July

January

March

May
April

August

October
November

January

March
April

August

October
November

January

March

May
April

July
August

October
November

April

July
August

October
November
2010 2011 2012 2013
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Figure 14. Control chart for the number of occurrences of property damage per month.

Table 2. Poisson control charts (department-wise): limits and trends.

Departments Incident categories LCL 
CL 
UCL N N  UCL Inference by observed trend
Dep_1 Injury 0 1.44 2.64 45 8 Random spread with many points near UCL.
Near-miss 0 1.11 2.16 45 7 Initial upward trend; then runs near CL and UCL.
Property damage 1.23 2.95 4.67 45 7 Random spread.
Dep_2 Injury 0.51 1.88 3.26 45 9 Random spread with many points near UCL.
Near-miss 0.57 1.97 3.38 45 8 Initial upward trend; then runs near UCL.
Property damage 0.19 1.35 2.52 45 9 Initial and end were downward with an upward spread in the middle.
Dep_3 Injury 0 1 4 45 2 Scattering found near UCL.
Near-miss 0 0.58 2.86 45 0 Scattering found in-between CL and UCL band.
Property damage 0 0.67 3.11 45 1 Scattering near CL.
Dep_4 Injury 0 2.77 7.77 22 0 Scattering near CL.
Near-miss 0 1.04 4.11 22 0 Spread near UCL.
Property damage 0 0.82 3.53 22 1 Upward trend to UCL.
Dep_5 Injury 0 0.51 2.65 45 1 Upward trend to UCL.
Near-miss 0 0.67 3.12 45 0 Scattering was in-between UCL and CL.
Property damage 0 0.84 3.60 45 1 Random spread.
Dep_6 Injury 0 0.58 2.86 45 0 Scattering was in-between UCL and CL.
Near-miss 0 0.78 3.42 45 1 Initial upward trend and then runs near to UCL.
Property damage 0 0.38 2.22 45 0 Random spread with upward trend to UCL.
Dep_7 Injury 0 0.51 2.65 45 2 Initially runs near LCL; then trends upward and runs near UCL.
Near-miss 0 0.29 1.90 45 3 The initial spread was between UCL and CL and, in the end, runs too close to UCL.
Property damage 0 0.40 2.29 45 2 The initial spread was near UCL and then runs close to CL.
Dep_8 Injury 0 0.24 1.73 45 2 Most of the points are lying on LCL but a sudden jump out to the UCL in the end.
Near-miss 0 0.42 2.37 45 1 Scattering was in-between CL and LCL with an upward run in the end.
Property damage 0 0.11 1.11 45 0 Random spread.
Dep_9 Injury 0 0.42 2.37 19 0 Random spread with upward run.
Near-miss 0 0.37 2.19 19 1 Runs near to LCL with upward trend in the last.
Property damage 0 0.52 2.70 19 0 Random spread.

LCL: lower control limit, CL: control limit, UCL: upper control limit, N: frequency.

4. Discussion while coming to or going from the workplace. Year-wise injury

4.1. Overall incident occurrence and reporting
The outcomes of this study answered many questions regard-
ing the safety status in terms of incidents occurring and the
measures of safety performance at various departments. All
three types of incidents, i.e. injury (36%), near-miss (30%) and
property damage (34%) almost equally contribute to a total
NOI. It shows the under-reporting of near-miss events because
according to previous studies, near-miss incidents occur larger
in number as compared to injury cases (Bird & Germain, 1986;
Heinrich, 1959; Phimister, Oktem, Kleindorfer, & Kunreuther,
2003). The most frequent type of injury is of the first-aid type
(51.55%), and then ex-gratia (19.15%) and LTI (16.9%). This
shows that the management is not only concerned about inju-
ries occurring while at work but also in injury occurrences
reporting of incidents shows that after the year 2010, the num-
ber of injuries occurring has increased and the number of
near-miss reporting has decreased. By discussing with a safety
professional, it was found that before 2011, there was a provi-
sion of incentive for near-miss reporting. Researchers
(Phimister et al., 2003; Schaaf, 1992; Williamsen, 2013) also
tried to find out the hindrance and barriers in reporting near-
miss events. From the earlier studies and discussion with safety
professionals, some of the identified reasons are: (1) fear of
criticism/victimization due to blame culture among employ-
ees, (2) lack of appreciation of reporting, (3) fear of direct or
indirect punishment by organization, (4) perception that
near-miss reporting is a non-value-added activity and wastage
of time, (5) lack of faith in the organization due to previous bit-
ter experiences and (6) due to macho culture among
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INJURY CONTROL AND SAFETY PROMOTION
workers, accepting the near-miss incidents as a part of the
work.
4.2. Worker behaviour and workplace-related issues
Unsafe behaviour of workers was the leading factor in the
occurrence of incidents. Due to unsafe act, 41% of incidents
occurred, and unsafe condition was reported for 40% of the
incidents. The behaviour of fellow-workers also causes 8% of
incidents. It means that there is a lack of coordination among
workers. There are 11% incidents where hazardous conditions
and worker’s unsafe acts both were responsible. One of the fac-
tors contributing to unsafe act is that, in many cases, workers
do not follow the SOPs. SOP non-compliance resulted in 33%
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property damage, 20% injury and 14% near-miss cases.
Further, inadequate SOPs resulted in 10% of injury, 12% of
near-miss and 8% of property damage cases. Compliance or
non-compliance does not matter if SOP is not adequate. It was
also observed that even after following the SOPs, 13% of inci-
dents occurred resulting in 12% injury, 11% near-miss and
15% of property cases. It denotes that something is wrong
from the administration-side which needs to be checked.
Further investigation is required to find out the solution of the
mentioned issue. It was also observed that in 5% cases, SOP
was required but not available. So, for the cases where SOP is
not available or inadequate, the plant administration should
take proper actions to prepare/modify, implement and main-
tain SOPs at work.
Vital primary causes behind different incidents were found
using the Pareto chart. Frequent causes of incidents are: derail-
ment (18.1%), slip/trip/fall (14.3%), road incident (11.9%), fire/
explosion (10.2%), dashing/collision (9.48%), process incident
(7.44%), etc. Slip/trip/fall (32.1%), road incident (24.8%), pro-
cess incident (7.32%), etc. come out as major reasons for injury
cases. Derailment (19.3%), fire/explosion (15.9%), process inci-
dents (10.2%) were the top contributors to near-miss events.
Similarly, derailment (36.1%), dashing/collision (16.3%) and
fire/explosion (14.5%) were involved in property damage cases.
It makes sense because while transporting raw material and
final products, property damage mostly happens. Many of the
‘primary causes’ were not reflected in any frequency-based
graph. To explore them, the cause–effect diagram was utilized.
It was found that some of the ‘primary causes’ were ambiguous
and the workers were not able to discriminate due to the simi-
larity of the incident process. Therefore, such primary causes
were clubbed (presented in Section 3.4) for the improvement
of data-logging in the SMS.
4.3. Department-level safety issues
From department-wise analysis (Figure 9), it was found that
Dep_1 is the most incident-prone department with mostly
property damage cases. Dep_1 is related to the management
and handling of raw materials. It was found from Section 3.6
that at Dep_1, derailment (43.5%), dashing/collision (15.3%)
and road incident (11.7%) were the most frequent causes and
unsafe behaviour by the worker himself was involved in
54.03% of cases. Dep_2 comes next to Dep_1 in incident fre-
quency and is related to coke-making. The most number of
13
injury cases occurred in this department as compared to other
departments. The main causes of incidents were recorded as
fire/explosion (16.6%), slip/trip/fall (16.2%), road incident
(14.0%) and process incident (13.2%). Unsafe condition
(53.2%) is primarily responsible for it because a hazardous
environment like heat, smoke, gas leakage, water spillage, etc.
are involved in the coke-making process. Dep_4 comes next to
Dep_2 in the frequency of incident occurrences; it is also
involved in coke-making. Similar to Dep_2, the main causes of
incident occurrence in Dep_4 were slip/trip/fall (37.3%), fire/
explosion (13.7%) and process incident (7.84%). But unlike
Dep_2, in Dep_4, unsafe behaviour of the worker himself
(48.04%) is involved more than unsafe condition (38.23%).
Dep_3 comes next to Dep_4; it is involved in sinter-making.
The major causes of incidents were reported as road incident
(21.8%), fire/explosion (14.9%) and slip/trip/fall (12.9%). With
33.6% of unsafe acts by the worker himself and 37.6% of unsafe
conditions, 18.8% of incidents were noticed where the unsafe
behaviour of a co-worker caused the incident. It reflects the
poor coordination among workers in Dep_3. Dep_5 came next
to Dep_3 concerning incident occurrences and it is involved in
the tracking and transportation of hot metal. The primary
causes were derailment (50.5%), road incident (16.7%) and
process incident (7.69%). Unsafe conditions (57.14%) were pri-
marily involved for most of the incidents in this department.
Dep_6, Dep_7 and Dep_8 are associated with the operation of
a BF. Most of the incidents in Dep_6 happened due to fire/
explosion (20.5%), hot metal (19.2%) and slip/trip/fall (12.8%).
Unsafe conditions were reported in 43.58% incidents, and 35%
have occurred due to unsafe acts by workers themselves. The
main causes of incident occurrences in Dep_7 were reported to
be hot metal (20.4%), road incidents (11.4%) and process inci-
dent (13.0%). 38.89% incidents occurred due to unsafe condi-
tions. It is also interesting to notice that 22.22% incidents
occurred due to unsafe behaviour by some co-worker, which
shows poor coordination among them. After discussion with
the plant personnel, it was found that Dep_8 has a newly
installed BF as compared to Dep_6 and Dep_7. So, compara-
tively fewer incidents happened here than the other two. The
main causes of incidents in this department were slip/trip/fall
(20%), process incidents (17.1%) and road incident (11.4%).
Unsafe conditions (57.14%) caused most of the incidents. The
last major department Dep_9 performs pellet-making activi-
ties. The department is new, and the data collection began after
May 2010. Of the limited incident reports available, it was
found that dashing/collision (32%), road incident (16%) and
process incident (12%) are the major causes of incidents. In
most of these incidents, unsafe conditions at workplace (60%)
were involved. Unsafe conditions in most of the departments
are due to a hot environment, dust, poor orderliness and
housekeeping of workplace and little maintenance of machines.
Most of the unsafe behaviours reported are due to non-compli-
ance of SOPs, improper equipment/tool usage, poor coordina-
tion in the group or macho culture.
4.4. Safety performance measurement
To examine the effects of safety interventions and to monitor
the hazards at workplace, the Poisson control chart was
 14 A. VERMA ET AL.
utilized. Poisson control charts were plotted for all the depart-
ments and incident-types. The control limits in the control
charts can be used to indicate the extent of incidents at a given
department. If the instances fall close to the LCL or show a
downward trend, it is indicative of under-reporting of inci-
dents. On the other hand, if injury and property damage inci-
dents are close to the UCL or showing an upward trend, this
indicates a lack of safety measure in that department. A work
system is said to be in control if the control chart shows only a
random pattern of the observations. All the control charts were
scrutinized, and the summarized details are presented in
Table 2. A scrutiny of the control charts revealed that the NOI
values are scattered randomly within the control limits for
most of the departments except for Dep_1, Dep_2 and Dep_7,
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in which many points were observed above the UCL value.
Dep_8 is also performing poorly for injury events. It was found
that for Dep_8, most of the injury instances were on LCL but a
sudden jump outside the UCL shows the ignorance for safety
efforts. Short trends of movement towards UCL and LCLs
were found in most of the cases. The continued upward trend
was found for overall (iron-making plant) injury incidents, and
the downward trend was for near-miss cases as shown
in Figures 12 and 13. These trends indicate that a decrease in
near-miss reporting might have suppressed the learning from
non-consequential incidents which get reflected in the increase
of injury cases.
5. Managerial implication
Identifying the sources of incident occurrences has always been
critical in large and complex plants like steel manufacturing.
The study utilized quality management tools to provide the
overall status report to dig down the common causes behind
different incident-types. The key findings from the exploratory
analysis were used for knowledge acquisition to improve the
future safety performance. This knowledge can be used to help
the management in decision-making and policy formation to
improve safety performance. Some of the findings and recom-
mendations based on that are listed as follows:
Recommendation 1: We observed that there is a relation
between the increase in near-miss cases and the
decrease in injury cases. Consequently, employees
should be encouraged to report these near-miss inci-
dents through manual form, verbal or electronic form
to their immediate supervisor.
Recommendation 2: Many of the incidents happened due to
inadequate SOPs. Some cases were found where the
SOP was required but was unavailable which requires
managerial intervention to standardize all the pro-
cesses, and a detailed SOP must be provided to all the
workers associated with that process. In some cases, the
workers do not follow the SOPs may have some behav-
iour or training-related issues. So, the management can
provide a regular, long duration and multiple safety
regulation training for both permanent and contractor
workers.
Recommendation 3: Some of the incidents under different
‘primary causes’ are ambiguous and many times, they
are similar. It necessitates the grouping of ‘primary
causes’ as shown and discussed in the cause–effect dia-
gram in Section 3.4. This can help in improving the
online reporting system.
Recommendation 4: The control chart pointed out the poor
performance of the raw material (Dep_1), coke-making
(Dep_2) and BF (Dep_7, Dep_8) departments in com-
parison to other departments. The administration can
design a focused policy for these departments to tackle
workers’ behaviour and workplace-related factors.
6. Conclusions
The study shows how a rich database can help in finding out
the causes of incidents in an iron-making plant. The study may
help the management to take decisions by giving the best pic-
ture of different incidents happening at workplaces. This analy-
sis will help practitioners to understand the major causes of
incident occurrences. A significant relationship between the
types of activities in a particular department and its primary
causes was found. From the results, it was identified that the
contributing factors to incidents (injury, near-miss and prop-
erty damage), depend upon the activities being performed.
Department-wise analysis helped to diagnose critical issues
present there and to take focused measures for that. The
administration of the plant should display safety information
at an appropriate place about the hazard present at that loca-
tion, provide training on the process to perform activities with
better coordination when a group is involved, provide adequate
SOPs and enforce the use of proper equipment, tool, personal
protective equipment. For future study, the control charts can
be practiced for other variables like cause-type, primary cause,
etc. In control chart, out of control points, above the UCL need
to be studied further. It should also be noted that even though
the processes are in control and in stable state, their perfor-
mance may still be poor due to under-reporting of incidents.
Further research is needed on how narrative texts can be
explored to demonstrate the process of most frequent inci-
dents. However, this study guides in learning from the past
and its implications for management.
7. Limitations
This study is successful to some extent for indicating the
description of incidents in a better way and answering some of
the interesting questions about the causal factors behind inci-
dents. However, we are not able to answer the question of why
exactly incidents happen and what will happen next? Further
research will focus on exploring the narrative text to extract the
actual reasons behind most frequent incidents and prediction of
future incidents. Data quality of incident reports entirely
depends upon the knowledge, understanding and interpretation
of a situation by the employees logging in the system. The scope
of study is also limited to an iron-making plant only.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Ministry of Human Resource Devel-
opment (MHRD) & Ministry of Steel, GOI, New Delhi, India, and Tata
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INJURY CONTROL AND SAFETY PROMOTION
Steel Limited, Jamshedpur, India for funding this research under Uchcha-
tar Avishkar Yojana (UAY) for the project entitled “Safety Analytics: Save
People at Work from Accidents and Injuries (WAI)”. The authors grate-
fully acknowledge the support and cooperation provided by the manage-
ment of the plant studied. The authors are also thankful to the learned
reviewers for their valuable suggestions in enriching the quality of the
paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), New Delhi, India,
Downloaded by [Indian Institute of Technology - Kharagpur] at 06:09 30 December 2017
Ministry of Steel, New Delhi, India, and Tata Steel Limited, Jamshedpur,
India.
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