Evidence-based decision-making strengthens safety culture

Rail and road-based freight transport and infrastructure solutions company Aurizon moves thousands of tonnes of coal, iron ore and other minerals as well as agricultural and general freight around the nation. It recently identified a number of improvements could be made in the areas of recording and managing safety and environmental incidents, near misses and hazards. The company worked with management consultancy firm Acaché to develop a business-driven technical solution to enhance capacity, capability, agility and performance and to help achieve its ZeroHarm objectives.

Acaché managed the overall deployment of the project and worked in close partnership with SAP Australia for the technical development. The Incident Management and Environmental Compliance (SAP EH&S) solution was implemented in six staged deployments. It has been structured so the recording and management of incidents, near misses and hazards follows a singular safety and environmental event process. Once an event has been recorded, an ‘Event Manager’ is assigned to manage the details through to close out. The system records the full details of the event as well as the investigation details, evidence and corrective actions. Once entered, the information is available through a range of standard analytical reports.

By sitting between Aurizon and SAP Australia, Acaché was able to assist business representatives and leadership teams to understand the change management challenges and how best to increase the speed of system adoption. “We don’t take on a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach or ‘here is your system, good luck with it’. This simply does not work, said David Aubrey, project manager at Acaché. “We used our capability model which holistically addressed all parts of the business and allowed Aurizon and its people to be successful and ensure there is a solid return on their investment and benefits of that investment are realised.”

The team of Acaché consultants provided services in project management, change management, training content development and delivery, rollout preparation and ‘go-live’ support. This approach freed Aurizon’s experts to continue supporting the business and reduced to a minimum their time commitments during the project development phase. “We take a multidimensional view of any project and focus on outcomes and realisation of benefits rather than just delivery of project deliverables,” said Aubrey.

Aurizon can now easily track safety event trends using the analytical reporting available to all users as part of the system. In addition, leading indicators such as hazard and near-miss categories help Aurizon identify those events where a negative outcome was avoided, and learning will potentially reduce incidents in future. Lagging indicators also help identify those areas where improvements can be made. For instance, classification of ‘No-Treatment’ injuries allows Aurizon to learn from these events and therefore potentially reduce future lost time injuries (LTIs) and medically treated injuries (MTIs).

Trends in injury type and body part can also help identify and prevent more serious events. For example, a campaign has been recently launched to raise awareness of the causes of LTIs and MTIs. Data identified that a large proportion the human factors contributing to injuries included rushing, complacency, distraction and fatigue.

Another analysis exercise showed the age profile of injured employees by injury severity. It is envisaged that as more data is collected, this type of analysis will help to inform the development of specific safety campaigns for apprentices and older employees.

Before implementation of SAP EHS, monthly performance reports required more than 40 hours of data collation, cleansing and analysis. Data is now updated overnight and can be drilled down to a team or work group. Managers and team leaders can now monitor performance and provide feedback to their teams on KPI trends on a daily, weekly, monthly or rolling 12-month basis.

“Aurizon has set the standard for the management of safety, health and environment reporting. We can now leverage the increase in data availability and resulting analytics to enhance our ability to proactively manage safety performance, protect work teams and ensure our customers’ needs are met,” said Aurizon Senior Vice President Safety Health & Environment Neil Backer.

“Following the staged deployments throughout 2012 and 2013, the benefits have already commenced and will continue to grow over subsequent months,” said Backer.

Picture from left to right: Craig Johnson - Director Acaché; Brendan James - Adviser Safety Assurance, Aurizon; David McMah - Manager Systems and Governance, Aurizon;  and Jack Garrido - Management Consultant, Acaché.

Aurizon and Acaché were announced as the winners of the Best Run Analytics in the SAP Customer Awards of Excellence 2013. Aurizon’s number one priority and core value is “safety of ourselves and others” so the focus of project benefits and return on investment is on strengthening safety performance, preventing injuries, developing proactive safety leadership and reducing impacts on the environment. The judges said it was clear that this project was not for financial gains but for implementing a system that is to improve the safety of its employees across the organisation.