Business Resilience Audits & Contractors

Dangerous incidents audits: This client develops heavy engineering and high technology infrastructure projects worldwide for private and government organisations. Following multiple fatalities over a number of years, the company was forced to investigate the cause of dangerous incidents and to make necessary improvements.

Some project highlights:

• Historical incident investigation which required tact to discover true root causes

• Cultural understanding gained from subcontractor interviews

• Demonstrating the true cost of poor H&S management

• Developing a realistic business resilience plan

S2 was asked to carry out a number of reviews and audits against our client’s business resilience plan. Senior consultants of S2 visited a number of challenging county operations to thoroughly review the projects and interview main contractors. Our findings indicated that the company and its partners were following safety procedures solely with a focus on formal compliance (box ticking) but with no real understanding or belief in actually improving safety. The main contractor had been able to avoid prosecution in these developing countries because they involved contracted workers. However, finally an incident prompted the (European) parent company to be mentioned in international news media which caused severe harm to their share price.

Improved effectiveness

Recommendations were made for improvements which S2 subsequently helped to develop and put in place. As a result, the company found that the new pragmatic, business-focussed systems helped them to operate more efficiently and realistically. The Business Resilience Plan (BRP) was updated to be more realistic. Significant money was saved in the following year to cover the cost of the investigation and development of the systems.