| In engineering, systems are designed to meet desired and defined objectives. In Industrial Engineering, these designs often involve humans in the system. One type of Industrial Engineering system that has been implemented over the years without true engineering or quantitative design has been the loss prevention system. The objective of a loss prevention system is preventing or minimizing loss to humans (injuries, etc.), the environment (spills, toxic releases, etc.) and losses to property and profits due to incidents. Systems are implemented by employing human resource time to intervention activities that are expected to prevent or minimize loss. These interventions, taken together are often called a loss prevention system. However, to date, there has not been an effective means to allow practitioners to quantifiably design a complete loss-prevention system. There has been no defined way to determine which of these interventions are preventing losses. If they are working as intended, there has not been a defined way to know the extent. If loss incidents increase, the human resource time applied to loss prevention interventions increases. If the loss producing incidents decrease, the time applied to these interventions usually decreases. Often, short windows of time are used to make qualitatively determined adjustments. The adjustments usually come after a subjectively determined, unacceptable change in the loss incident rate. The response to change does not involve a quantifiable design for the investment of human resource time that will be applied to the overall loss prevention system, nor is there an objective determination made as to which interventions human resource time will be applied.; The primary objective of this two-phase study was to determine if a comprehensive loss prevention system could be designed, quantified and optimized. The findings indicate that this objective is achievable. The statistically significant findings indicate that the loss producing incident rate (incidents per 200,000 man-hours of exposure) is sensitive to changes in the percent of available man-hours applied to the loss prevention interventions. It is a measurable sensitivity that makes this four-category intervention system optimizable. The results of the study provide a springboard for further study, more thoroughly addressing the quantitative aspects of the interventions as well as the quality of the interventions. The model and study results also provide a tool that will assist engineers or loss control professionals in their effort to quantifiably design an optimized loss prevention system. |
