Linde Group
Supporting safety performance
Linde Group chose Synergi Life
The Linde Group is the largest gases and engineering company in the world. After the group's acquisition of BOC in 2006, the management team chose the flexibility and configurability of Synergi Life for the entire organization.
Software for incident and risk management
When the British-based BOC was taken over by The Linde Group in 2006, one of the first issues at hand in the field of safety, health, environment, quality (SHEQ) was to choose software for incident management.
Mike Furmston, Head of Global Enabling Functions – LSA at The Linde Group, says that in the research being done on various solutions, it quickly became evident that the software already in use by one Linde Group division in Northern Europe was the flexible solution they were looking for.
Soon the management team decided to implement the software, Synergi Life, in the entire global organization – which is currently at 63,500 employees in more than 100 countries. They are using the Incident Management module (incident management system) and the Activity Management module (activity based management).
The Linde Group is is a gases and engineering company with operations on five continents. The company supplies gases such as oxygen, nitrogen, argon, hydrogen, helium and other speciality gases, and the delivery is either through pipelines, on tankers or in cylinders. Other divisions design, manufacture and construct industrial plants. In addition, The Linde Group has a presence in both healthcare and logistics services.
Risk management data mapping
Furmston is responsible for delivering Synergi Life globally. “We decided to start small and grow bigger,” he says of the implementation process. “You start recording incidents and adding data. Then you do evaluations and map the data. You make some changes. Now people are finding ways to use Synergi Life in different ways. Different parts of the organization are looking at managing incidents in a different way. Incident management has developed from being just safety incidents to general incidents. We’re looking at incidents at customer sites, we’re looking at incidents in the healthcare environment. All of that requires special attention. But it’s grown out of the basic premise of what we did in the beginning: starting simple, growing and adding elements to it. And we continue to grow,” he says.
Furmston’s colleague Andrew Owen, Performance Manager HSE, says that although he cannot deduce that Synergi Life has reduced the number of incidents, it has definitely supported them in the process.
Reduced lost time incident rate
“What we can say is that our lost time incident rate is reduced over the last four or five years. Some of that is undoubtedly because we learn more from our incidents,” he says. “We are able to analyse the data we put into Synergi Life and start to learn lessons as to what’s gone wrong.”
Furmston is quick to assess the most important strengths of Synergi Life. “The key one is flexibility,” he says. “The second one is language. It is vitally important for users who don’t speak English to be able to report the incident in their local language. The third one is that it’s web-based and independent. People can report from anywhere.”
Configurable software
Owen is a chemical engineer by training and has worked for the company for 28 years. “Probably the most important thing from my perspective was that we could get the data out. We liked the reporting side of the module. We could see that we could categorize and then run reports to see what was going wrong, to see what the root causes were or where we were having incidents. That was a very simple process to do,” he says. “We could see that Synergi Life was very configurable, very flexible, it could do what we wanted it to do.”
“Our management team is very satisfied with Synergi Life,” he says. “They are beginning to reap the benefits of the data we have.” That has not happened overnight, as incident management is a process of learning from previous data. “We have to collect data for a year or two before we can start to trend on the same basis. Now we’re able to do that,” says Owen. “The management team is getting more interested in the data that is there and are regularly asking the questions: ‘What do we have in Synergi Life? Can Synergi Life answer the QHSE question?’”
Top reasons why we chose Synergi Life software:
- Part of the group was using Synergi Life with success prior to implementation in global organization
- Configurability and flexibility of Synergi Life
- Multi-language input in drop-down menus
- Functionality of report generation
This is what we gained:
- Flexible solution that does what we want it to do
- Users in more than 100 countries can use local languages
- Independent web-bases software
- Users find Synergi Life very easy to use
THE LINDE GROUP IN BRIEF
The Linde Group is the largest gases and engineering company in the world with approximately 63,500 employees working in more than 100 countries worldwide. The Linde Group has three divisions: Gases, Engineering and Gist. The company is a world leader in the international gases market offering a wide range of compressed and liquefied gases as well as chemicals. The gases are used, for example, in the energy sector, steel production, chemical processing, environmental protection, and welding, as well as in food processing, glass production and electronics.
