The supply chain can be one of the riskiest parts of a business. On top of being prone to disruption, transportation and shipping have the second-highest number of workplace injuries of any sector.

Supply chain operations are inherently risky to some extent, but they don’t have to be dangerous. Better health and safety standards can lead to fewer and less severe injuries. In that spirit, here are five steps to improve safety standards in your supply chain.

1. Analyze Your Specific Risk Environment

The first step to creating effective safety standards is understanding the specific risks employees face. Some significant overall hazards in the supply chain aren’t relevant to every facility. For example, forklifts caused 70 workplace deaths in 2017, but if your warehouses don’t use forklifts much, they’re a less concerning factor.

Review past incident reports to see when and where workers were when they got injured and what they were doing. Some trends should emerge, showing the most relevant hazards. The workflows, places or equipment that pop up in the most reports deserve the most attention.

2. Improve Safety Monitoring

Next, facilities need to improve their monitoring practices to give more insight into injury trends and improve communication. Internet of things (IoT) devices are some of the most helpful tools for this step. Using these connected wireless sensors will provide immediate, easily accessible records of the situations surrounding injuries.

IoT sensors can also help avoid safety incidents by highlighting risks before they turn into injuries. Smart textiles can monitor body temperature and heart rate to alert workers when they need to take a break. Implementing tools like this across a supply chain will help narrow down the biggest hazards and prevent more incidents.

3. Remove Workers From Hazards

Many safety standards aim to minimize the dangers of workplaces hazards, like teaching workers safe lifting techniques. However, a more effective approach is to remove workers from hazardous work. The key here is automation.

Robots can automate many dangerous tasks like heavy lifting and material moving, and they’re often better at it, too. If you can automate areas where the most injuries happen, you can eliminate those injuries entirely. Review your manual workflows to see where injuries occur, then compare automation options to see if robotics is a feasible solution.

4. Align Standards Across Facilities and Partners

The distributed nature of supply chains means they involve facilities across various cities, states and even countries. Safety regulations will vary between these areas, leading to uneven workplace standards. If you compare these and create a consolidated policy that applies everywhere instead, it’ll be easier to measure safety data and enforce regulations.

Start with the strictest legal regulations that apply to any of your supply chain facilities. Use those requirements as a baseline for workplace standards and methods, and apply them across the board.

It’s also important to apply these standards to supply chain contractors and partners. Companies have reduced injuries by 20% by only working with partners that meet pre-defined safety standards.

5. Embrace Ongoing Improvement

Many safety standards fall short because they never change. While it’s easy to see this process as a one-time action, that principle will lead to policies that quickly become outdated. Instead, companies should regularly review their safety data and standards to find any possible improvements.

At least once a year, management should look through the supply chain’s safety statistics. If any incident types stand out or trends have emerged, safety policies may need to change to address them. Similarly, you should review what new technologies and strategies are available that could offer any improvements.

Supply Chain Safety Starts With Management

It’s easy to think of workplace safety as a matter of workers being more careful, but this view leads to ineffective policies. Better supply chain safety begins with company standards. Management must take a holistic approach to safety, creating an environment that naturally removes risks.

These five steps can help guide supply chain managers to eliminate and mitigate hazards in their networks. If more companies can embrace these principles, transportation and logistics can become far safer.