A refreshing take on EHS management

3 minutes

For Finnish brewery company Olvi Limited, safety has never been better. And Lauri Multanen, Operations Director at the chain, credits part of that success to the implementation of the Quentic EHS mobile app. Discussing its previous poor records, Lauri Multanen says: “We have not had a very good safety history. We had lots of small accidents, nothing major or serious, but too many minor incidents. For the past five years we have been working on this, and now we have actually been able to cut the amount of incidents and accidents down to almost zero. We only had one minor accident within the past year, and Quentic has been a very important part of the whole process of reducing incidents within that time.”

About Olvi Oyj

Olvi is a Finnish beverage company that offers enjoyable beverages to its consumers. Olvi has been producing beverages in Iisalmi since 1878. Currently the company has facilities in Finland, Belarus and the Baltic states. Olvi has 1,797 employees located in 5 countries.

Safety management at your fingertips

Knowing that a mobile application would lead the organization towards a safer and more modern future, Olvi ultimately found Quentic, a partnership that would go on to improve its EHS statistics dramatically. On selecting the app, Lauri Multanen says: “We had a couple of demos from similar kinds of applications, and we saw three or four different options in total, but we chose the Quentic App because it seemed to be highly visual, simple to use and practical, and consequently would fulfil our need well.”

As a result, Lauri Multanen believes that taking EHS management mobile was the right step: “We can now do nearmiss reports on the spot as soon as a problem is spotted or something happens. We can log the accident in the system there and then, and take photographs at the scene and add that to the report. You can have a whole story created in the same system and have it done on-site. You can also pin your location to a map in order to identify your location when conducting these reports, which is also helpful. The app is compatible with all modern mobile phones, so it can be used site-wide very easily.” 

Olvi also implemented different checklists and inspections, such as 5S audits, into the Quentic App. That makes it much easier to gather all relevant information and include photos in the reports. The Quentic App creates 5S index trends automatically to show the development and encourage people to keep EHS standards on a high level. Much of the process is automated to save customers time when reporting.

Engaging employees

Lauri Multanen believes that this use of accessible technology has increased worker engagement with health and safety practices, which in turn has seen a rise in the amount of reports being made on the ground. He says: “The number of near miss reports has increased after the rollout of this system, because it is easy to use and you can use it on mobile when on site, which helps a lot. You can use a QR code, the square code that you just read with your mobile phone to immediately open the system, and it’s just very easy. The reception has been very positive. And of course, the easier the system is to use, the easier it is to launch for the employees, so you don’t have to have a comprehensive training system, you can just roll it out and enjoy!”

Managing standards as well as safety

Across Olvi’s Finnish brewery location, the Quentic App is not only in use to monitor safety procedures—it has also been utilised in maintaining quality standards. Lauri Multanen tells us: “We don’t just use Quentic for the safety features, we also use it for quality control and environmental monitoring. So we actually have three elements in place in the system. In the same way that we can do the near-miss reports concerning safety, if there is something hazardous or if something is considered a potential safety risk, we can also do the same thing to uphold standards and compliance—for example if the employee detects something that can be harmful in terms of the quality of the products or food safety.”

Improvements on many levels

For the Finnish branch of Olvi Oyj, the decision to implement the Quentic App was one that helped the brewery site to achieve a turnaround in its health and safety efforts. Lauri Multanen summarizes: “Quentic has been an essential part of the total process of health and safety improvement here at Olvi and results have been very good. We keep a record of our accident-free days, and we hit a new record at the end of the last year. The Quentic App is one of the actions we have taken in order to improve the safety situation. It is a tool which enables us to take advantage of mobile equipment in improving safety, quality and environmental processes.”