The use of statistical problem solving methods for Risk Assessment

It is typical, also in agriculture industry, that safety is a performance area in which it is difficult to plan and control a real improvement. The normal approach to safety improvement is through Risk Assessment. Unfortunately this approach is strongly limited because the evaluation of the risks is based on evaluator’s experience and expertise and so it is affected by low level of reliability. The aim of this paper is to show how the use of statistical problem solving method, such as Six Sigma, could be useful to improve safety level in working activities. In particular high level of improvement could be obtained by a more structured collection of injuries data considering not only the injuries frequency rate related to the root causes or risks. Following several instructions it could be possible to obtain a database of Risk Indicators based on real data that could be used for a more reliable Risk Assessment.