DEVELOPMENT OF A SAFETY PROTOCOL FOR FACILITY MANAGERS IN THE SELECTION OF ROPE ACCESS COMPANIES

Abstract

Safety can never be compromised and managing project safety can be learned. This is especially important if work involves high risks. This study seeks to provide a guideline to assist facility managers in the selection of rope access services in order to improve the odds of having an injury free work place and provide a better and safer working environment. Rope access systems have been perceived as the panacea to provide cleaning and maintenance solutions to high-rise and uniquely designed buildings. The common cleaning and maintenance solutions such as cherry pickers, boom lifts and scaffolding are slowly deemed to be infeasible with high-rise and uniquely designed buildings. However, there is limited evidence to showcase the existence of frameworks such as standards, regulations and guidelines to regulate rope access system in Singapore. Ministry of Manpower (MOM) is moving towards the direction in developing regulations for rope access system, but is still in the nascent stage. This study focuses on how safety knowledge levels of the facility managers in the selection and management of rope access system and how the lack of existing frameworks affects the facility managers’ selection criteria of rope access companies. Quantitative data was collected through a survey questionnaire from facility managers in the Facilities Management (FM) industry while qualitative data was collated through semi-structured and in-depth interviews from both the facility managers and the rope access service providers. It was subsequently proven that facility managers generally lack the safety knowledge in the selection of rope access companies. Findings from the interviews also concluded that there is a high variation of safe and quality standards in the rope access industry. A proposed safety protocol was developed to tackle the research problem and was pilot tested. It consists of two sets, one set for the facility managers and another set for rope access companies to conduct self-assessment.