Modernizing Control of Work for Safer, More Productive Mining

Challenges

The organization wanted to modernize Control of Work across its sites while reducing operational risk, strengthening safety oversight and improving workforce productivity. Three challenges stood out:

Shutdown permitting was slow and risky

Handwriting permits took up to 30 hours across roughly 1,200 permits. Handwritten forms were often difficult to read, and paper permits were vulnerable to loss or damage. This created delays in shutdown preparation and execution, added safety and compliance risk, and placed a heavy administrative burden on teams.

Simultaneous high-risk work was hard to coordinate

Manual communication and manual competency checks slowed decisions for Process Safety and Operations leaders and raised incident risk.

Manual isolation verification

A manual process vulnerable to human error, including misreading identifiers and selecting incorrect isolation points undermined critical control assurance for Process Safety and EHS.

Solution

• Sphera implemented a Digital Control of Work solution unifying permit to work, isolations and risk assessments in a single record. The solution enabled the organization to: Digitize and standardize permit to work end to end, removing paper entirely.
• Apply a minimum standard with role-based access and permissions, checks and balances across permits, isolations and confined space documentation, and templated work with copy and view-similar features.
• Identify isolation points using QR codes and diagram-based isolation lists, creating a visual, traceable record of who scanned what, and when.
• Automatically block permit issuance when referenced isolations aren’t confirmed in place.
• Complete the full permitting workflow on mobile, online or offline, through an intuitive app requiring minimal training.