Working together mitigates risk

When it comes to PPE, don’t wait to learn from your mistakes – learn from trusted suppliers with industry expertise

As with every aspect of life, maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) has undergone enormous disruption since the start of the decade. Respondents to the RS and Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS) Indirect Procurement Report 2025, for example, list inflation and higher costs as well as managing risk in the supply chain and supply chain disruption as the biggest procurement challenges in the next 12 months.

These challenges come on top of day-to-day challenges and long-standing business pressures such as reduced operational budgets and improving asset performance – the latter of which has been joined by sustainable and ethical procurement as a top priority.

One way to address these issues is through collaboration with trusted suppliers. Developing these partnerships brings many advantages as well as opportunities to learn and develop. This can be particularly beneficial for those in high-risk sectors such as the water, waste, power generation, power distribution and telecoms industries. Here Chris Cruise, Industry Sector Manager for Utilities at RS, shares why.

Understand risk factors
A wide range of different industries make up the Utilities sector but one feature common to them all is risk. Whether it’s water pumping station or sewage treatment works, these are hazardous workplaces where the need for robust health and safety provision is non-negotiable.

“There are a huge range of hazards that utilities firms have to handle,” says Cruise. “Just take the water industry: biological hazards, working at heights, arc flash, switch panels, chemicals, oils, grease, heavy objects, mechanical moving parts and machinery. Workers are lifting, they’re in confined spaces, they’re digging up pipes adjacent to other hazards.”

Every incident is hugely damaging for the individuals and businesses involved, but for the latter there also can be legal, financial and reputational consequences. In early 2022, for example, there was press coverage of a water supplier and a contractor pleading guilty to health and safety charges after a worker nearly lost his leg after it became trapped during an incident at a reservoir. The two companies were fined almost £400,000. A few months later, an energy multinational and another contractor were fined a total of £1.8 million after health and safety breaches during work at an electricity substation led to an explosion that damaged a worker’s retina.

Ensure there are controls
The level of risk is compounded by the sheer size of these industries; the gas network, for instance, includes 275,000 kilometres of buried pipes. Attempts to address these hazards must build upon the hierarchy of controls. A fundamental element of health and safety compliance, the hierarchy of controls involves reducing risks according in order of priority – with Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) used as a last resort.

These priorities are:

• Elimination (eliminate or remove the hazard)
• Substitution (replace the hazard with a less hazardous one)
• Engineered controls (reduce exposure to the hazard or isolate people from the hazard)
• Administrative controls (change and improve the way that people work)
• PPE (protect the worker with PPE when a hazard cannot be reasonably eliminated)

Work with experts
When it comes to the final stage in that hierarchy, PPE, working with expert suppliers can help to ensure that your organisation has the most robust procedures and most effective products in place.

How? Because expert suppliers, those with specialist industry knowledge and experience, understand the risks involved and how to mitigate against them whether through products or value-added solutions.

“We have contracts with, say, the water industry. We serve their PPE needs and have knowledge of industry requirements,” observes Cruise. “We have the range, the expertise and the technical support to meet our customer needs.

“Our colleagues are technical experts. When they’re out in the field, they’re talking with customers around very specific challenges and how to meet those challenges.”

Learn about good practices
At one facility, workwear that remained on site so it could be correctly washed to remove the dangerous enzymes from wastewater kept shrinking. When a member of the RS team went to investigate, they discovered that unlike at other sites, this location lacked a proper drying room. Workers were therefore putting garments through a tumble dryer at hot temperatures for a quick turnaround. The RS team developed an interim solution while the water company considers how to create a drying room.

It isn’t just individual companies that benefit from such industry experience and expertise. “We take a lot of our knowledge across the sector,” says Cruise, “so if we have something that works with one water supplier, we will then tell another about what we’ve done and offer a trial.

“Sometimes there are even nuggets of learning that transfer across industries to other parts of the utility sector as well. If something works, we share that knowledge.”

This specialist knowledge is also a valuable resource if your organisation encounters a problem or challenge – as a case study in the RS Water and Wastewater Industry Sector Report highlights.

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