Measuring the effectiveness of a near-miss management system: An application in an automotive firm supplier

• Near-miss management systems are support an effective accident prevention at workplace.
• Precursor events provide weak signals for promoting learning loops at workplace.
• A framework for “measuring” global effectiveness of NMS is proposed.
• An application is discussed in an automotive firm supplier.
• Results outline continuous improvement points for safety prevention programs.

Accidents and near-miss events are usually characterized by common causes and different consequences; a near-miss event is a potential hazardous condition where the accident sequence was interrupted; these events have common causes with accidents (or injuries), but, differently from the latters near miss consequences are null (or reduced).Thus, near-miss events are accident precursors; furthermore, they provide “weak signals” to safety managers for preventing more effectively injuries at workplace. The study proposes a methodological framework to verify the global effectiveness of a near-miss management system (NMS): the model is based on lean safety and learning loops strategies. The proposed framework uses data collected by the firm NMS crossed with information extracted from occurred accidents/injuries. A case study in an automotive firm supplier is proposed aiming to validate the proposed framework. The analysis has revealed effective to outline overall potentialities of the proposed approach together with improvement points for the firm NMS application.