Introduction

Since its inauguration by King Alphonse XII of Spain in 1919, Metro de Madrid —the Spanish capital’s subway system— has become a continuously expanding company, not only in terms of the extension of its underground rail network, which has grown from a single fourkilometer line covering the route from the Puerta del Sol station to Cuatro Caminos, to 12 lines covering 226 kilometers, but also with regard to the services it provides to the citizens of Madrid. Logically, this expansion has generated growth in the number of employees: there are now 5,400 of them striving to provide subway users the best possible quality of service. But this effort must be backed by optimum safety conditions.

Legislative framework

The object of Spain’s Occupational Hazards Prevention Act is to promote workers’ health and safety by applying the relevant measures and developing the activities required to head off risks arising from work (Article LPRL). To achieve this objective, the Occupational Hazards Prevention Act regulates the actions to be taken by government agencies, employers, workers and their various representative organizations. One of the actions this law stipulates for the employer (Article 31.1 LPRL) is “to have recourse to one or more of its own or external prevention services, that will cooperate whenever necessary”. The Act defines prevention service as “the set of human and material resources needed to carry out preventive actions to guarantee the adequate protection of the workers’ safety and health” (Article 31.2 LPRL).

Context in which the need arises

The material means cited in the Act are the arena into which it makes sense to introduce industrial safety and health management applications. The context in which the consideration of implementing a prevention management system in Metro de Madrid, S.A., arises can be summarized in three basic points:

• The expansion, in recent years, of the physical space in which preventive measures need to be applied has made the traditional material means insufficient and unwieldy for suitable and effective prevention management.
• The management system that is best suited to the needs of Metro de Madrid, S.A., due to the high degree of coverage of the functionality required is the SAP R/3 System EH&S module, and specifically the IHS Industrial Health and Safety submodule.
• The use by Metro de Madrid, S.A. of the SAP R/3 system for the management of diverse areas of its business activity, and more specifically of those areas that are most closely related to occupational hazard prevention: HR, MM and PM. 

In this context, the objectives to be attained by Metro de Madrid, S.A., by establishing an occupational hazard prevention management system are:

• To have a system that will unify, in a single environment, the variety of management elements that Metro de Madrid has worked with to date;
• To have a system that will enable Metro de Madrid to identify the hazards to which each worker is exposed according to the work site, the work done and the individual’s personal limitations;
• To have a system in which the different risks that arise can be recorded, along with the origin, evaluations and specific actions taken to prevent each risk;
• To have a system which enables the cost of the preventive activity to be monitored, and the related physical documentation to be rapidly accessed. 

The project

The project involving the implementation of the SAP R/3 EH&S module began in January 2003 and entered its productive phase in April of the same year. In the development of the project, the definition and implementation of the following points bear highlighting:

• Definition of prevention structures and their integration into the Human Resources module;
• Definition of risk agents and their corresponding methods of analysis, as well as the association with the structures in which they are found;
• Definition of chemical substances and other material elements present in hazard prevention (individual and collective protective equipment, measuring instruments, etc.);
• Definition of the processes in which hazard prevention is structured, identifying their source and monitoring both the preventive measures and their costs;
• Integration with external applications (Occupational Medicine, Document Manager, etc.);
• Exploitation of the information through both custom-developed reports and queries and templates developed with WWI. 

In the definition of each of the points described above, we took the following determining factors into account:

• Respect for the functionality of the modules that had already been implemented. This led, at times, to the adoption of more complex solutions that, by covering the required functionality, solved the problems presented in a solid, satisfactory way.
• The need to take into account the possibility of future implementations of other EH&S submodules, such as Occupational Medicine, while carrying out the implementation.
• The need to minimize additional developments to facilitate maintenance or possible future migrations. 

Both in the conceptual design phase and in its implementation phase, the project was carried out by a mixed team composed of DMR Consulting professionals and SAP España.

Benefits

The implementation of EH&S as a solution that supports Metro de Madrid’s occupational hazard prevention management process has generated a series of benefits that are indicated below and which, in many cases, go beyond the initial project objectives:

• Compliance with current legislation governing the prevention of occupational hazards, a fact that entails:
• • Minimization of occupational hazards.
  • Increased employee safety.
  • Rapid reaction to changes in legislation and regulation. 
• Integration into a single platform of all the prevention management tools that Metro Madrid has been using to date;
• Speed and reliability in the evaluation of hazards and in monitoring the preventive actions taken and their associated costs;
• Integration of the prevention management platform with other SAP and non-SAP applications;
• Improvement of the quality and availability of information:
• • Single information input.
  • Dynamic, flexible exploitation of the information.
  • Option of maintaining a constant study of the company’s safety status.
  • Support information for audits. 
• Flexibility in the event of organizational changes or changes in preventive action planning;
• Simplification of the prevention processes and of the documentation systems;
• Minimization of maintenance effort.