A new measurement index developed by Avetta and the National Safety Council (NSC) takes a systems-based approach to determine health and safety weak spots within an organization’s supply chain.
The Safety Maturity IndexTM (SMI) is expected to be available to select North American clients in March 2025.
Scott DeBow, ARM, Principal of Health/Safety & Environment for Avetta, said the company—a provider of supply chain risk management (SCRM) software—began discussing the idea of a maturity index several years ago.
“The thing about focusing and studying maturity of an organization alongside culture is you really need one before the other, because safety culture is a byproduct of org culture,” he says. “To assess culture well, it’s a bit of a big lift.”
Avetta and NSC combined 15 years of NSC research, data from Avetta’s global contractor network, and insights from forward-thinking companies like Avetta clients Meta, Entergy, and Cargill, to design the SMI. The SMI goes beyond traditional metrics by identifying, assessing, and surfacing the maturity of the contractor’s organizational use of their safety management systems to ensure a safer working environment. The index further focuses on risk management, enabling a comprehensive and accurate safety evaluation to verify a contractor’s Safety Management System (SMS).
“The challenge in the industry is that it’s really not fair or accurate to measure me, a small or medium supplier, on a recordable incident rate that isn’t very informative compared to a larger supplier,” DeBow notes.
OSHA never developed that metric to be used as an individual, client by client, measurement, he adds. “There were so many different factors. It’s designed to be a broader benchmark tool within an industry.”
“Avetta and the NSC have taken great strides to create a new methodology (SMI) to assess an organization’s health and safety maturity,” says Collette Nida-Brown, CSP, Enterprise Environmental, Health & Safety Manager, Meta. “This is a game-changer for industry and will allow Avetta’s hiring clients to have additional insight and metrics for suppliers in their network. Additionally, it will provide guidance to drive continuous health and safety improvements to suppliers for opportunities in strengthening their safety management system.”
How the SMI works
Grounded in recognized industry standards such as ISO 45001 and ANSI Z-10, SMI scores are weighted based on contractor findings, evidence and verification methods, and are calculated using a 0-100 grading scale across five primary categories:
- Safety Leadership & Structure: The evaluation of leadership practices, incentives, and structures designed to produce positive safety outcomes.
- Hazard Identification & Controls: The ability for an organization and its workers to properly identify potential SIF hazards and deploy the proper controls and safeguards for these hazards.
- Worker Training & Competency: The ability for an organization to identify worker roles, training needs, and verify competency based on role and work type.
- Incident Management & Response: An organization’s systems, methods, and practices used to investigate, learn from, and respond to incidents.
- Improvements & Communications: The communication tools and processes used to distribute new safety improvements and knowledge across managers and employees.
The SMI is built on statistically relevant questions across these categories that have been proven over time to be leading indicators, allowing organizations to leverage actionable insights to manage risk, prevent accidents, and continually improve safety.
DeBow says Avetta and NSC have built a shared microsite to provide suppliers with resources to improve in areas where the SMI has found weaknesses.
“It connects them to resources to learn and grow,” he says. “As they’re part of the Avetta network, we can just monitor here’s what they scored, here’s the resources they can plug into and improve, and how can they improve during the life cycle.”
The SMI is designed to look beyond compliance in a complex chain of suppliers and contractors.
“It takes it from a compliance-only platform into a performance improvement platform, which I think is very important. No one’s figured out the magic wand yet to solve everything,” DeBow says. “To my knowledge, no one’s done this in the manner of addressing the complexity of a supply chain and allowing suppliers an opportunity to improve in the process.”
Next steps
DeBow says Avetta is currently refining and finalizing the questions and scoring methodology in preparation for the SMI’s release in March.
“What’s very important is the opportunity to connect this to organizational learning and improvement, which is a critical element of HOP, human organizational performance,” he says. “When we look at our scoring method, we might see people who are compliant but are scoring poorly in the maturity index. We want to know that, who are they and what did they score. But there’s a smaller percentage that scored really strong on the SMI and we want to know more about them” to share best practices with others.
The focus is to get clients to engage in risk-based thinking, adds DeBow.
“Risk-based thinking would say, ‘What more do I need to know about what’s going on?’ [Now] we have that satisfied to a basic level, but risk-based thinking would say, ‘What more do I need to know about what’s really going on?’ So safety maturity kind of informs that thinking process and outcome.”
Avetta and NSC will also provide access to a membership package that includes safety improvement tools and resources to support contractors in the Avetta network. To learn more about the new SMI and available offerings, visit https://avetta.com/safety-maturity.