A major step in fatigue management

yearbook 2021 A major step in fatigue management

As we continue to work through the COVID-19 pandemic, employers are recognising their role and responsibility for providing employees with safe and healthy working conditions

This focus on employee well-being is particularly relevant in heavy industry, where workers routinely perform dangerous or complex tasks in high-risk environments, all while working extended shifts, often at night and in remote environments.

Fatigue management has emerged as a priority for heavy industry firms in construction, mining and a number of other vertical industries with complex operations.

They are now recognising the proven correlation between workforce fatigue and operational productivity.

Fatigue Science, which provides predictive analytics on human performance to industrial firms, elite sport teams, and the military, has launched ReadiAnalytics™, an analytics and fatigue management information system.

ReadiAnalytics delivers real-time, scientifically validated, and objective visibility into workforce fatigue levels and its underlying causes.

New data reveals that less fatigued workforces are measurably more productive and that data confirms the well-established benefits for employee health, safety, and retention.

As the incremental productivity benefits and associated return on investment are now clear, leadership teams are seeking objective, timely and quantified measures of on duty fatigue levels for each crew or team and site in their operation.

Industrial firms pursuit of objective data to support performance optimisation coincides with a larger trend -- the shift toward data-driven decision-making enabled by the Industrial Internet of Things (IIot).

While data on machine performance has grown exponentially in recent years, data on workforce performance and fatigue have long been viewed as a blind spot for otherwise data-rich organizations.

“Our customers today have operational data flowing from nearly every asset in their operation: trucks, pipes, shovels, and pumps all generate millions of data points each day,” says Andrew Morden, President and Chief Executive of Fatigue Science.

“And yet, most industrial firms lack objective measures on the performance of their most valuable asset: their workforce.”

“When it comes to the causes and extent of worker fatigue, most management teams are essentially ‘flying blind’. Now with ReadiAnalytics , firms no longer need to guess when and where fatigue is present, or how significant it is. The validated data is right there in the dashboard, on-demand and in real-time.”

Unlike subjective methods for estimating crew fatigue ReadiAnalytics captures anonymous sleep data from a sample of crew workers and then processes it alongside a variety of circadian factors with a scientifically validated biomathematical model.

The model then quantifies which on-duty crews will be the most and least fatigued, and how that fatigue will trend over time as their shift pattern progresses. Crucially, worker privacy is preserved, as insights are anonymised and aggregated for each crew, site, and the company.

Beyond providing fatigue data, ReadiAnalytics also reveals the underlying causes of this fatigue.

It segments the portion that is attributable to structural factors, like schedules, versus human factors, such as sleep health and habits. These insights are instrumental in informing specific strategies to reduce fatigue levels, and ultimately, drive concrete improvements to productivity, safety, and cost.

“So often, and particularly at this moment in history, employers are being forced to choose between their bottom line and the health and safety of their workers.

“Reducing fatigue, fortunately, is one of those rare opportunities where safeguarding workers’ health also maximizes productivity,” says Morden.

“With ReadiAnalytics, we’ve shown customers a direct correlation between workers’ fatigue levels and their hourly output.

“For example, we paired our proprietary fatigue data with telematics data from haul trucks and mine shovels,” adds Morden. “At the same time, sleep is fundamentally important for a healthy immune system, with documented benefits for both reducing short-term absenteeism and increasing long-term employee retention.

“Reducing the hard costs from accidents, incidents, and equipment damage attributable to fatigue is also a key motivator for employers looking to use our predictive analytics to achieve a measurable reduction in fatigue,” he says.