MACHINE SAFETY Be Informed –using data to create safe sites and safe behaviours

SiteZone has been working with customers to make their sites safer with proximity warning systems for over 12 years. SiteZone’s managing director, Gary Escott, talks to Construction Worx…

“Data is a tool for enhancing intuition.” This quote came from Hilary Mason, a data scientist and we think it perfectly sums up the way our customers use data.

You know your site, you know your organisation, and you know your operating procedures and safe systems of work. And you often know if there is an area of your site, or an operation that may be higher risk than others. By monitoring how people are behaving around moving plant, where more zone breaches are happening, and by who, you can use this data to back up your intuition. This can then be used to get management buy-in, improve staff training, revise site layouts, and ultimately create a safer site and improved behaviours around mobile plant.

Our latest version data platform, SiteZone BI, uses telematics to give you location data, machine data, and person (tag) data. It’s built in Microsoft PowerBI - a tool that many companies are already using. This makes access and training much easier, leaving you to focus on what’s important – running your site and keeping your employees safe. You can set it up to suit you and have the power to drill down into the granular level of detail to see what happened at a certain hour between a named machine and tag ID (person).

“Every zone breach is a potential accident that has been prevented by our proximity warning system. Having this data gives our customers tangible evidence to make informed decisions about their site and employees. And we’ve seen some sites make great improvements. A waste site we work closely with used the data to reduce their zone breaches from 2,000 in month 1 to just 50 in month 3 – a 97.5% improvement . They did this by making several changes to their site including redesigning pedestrian routes, improving physical barriers, reducing points of access, and increasing staff awareness.”

We know that construction sites can be more complex, with many points of access and it’s not as easy to create barriered segregated walkways. However, we’re working closely with a customer on a highways project to look at the data weekly and question what is happening on the ground.

Data is presented to inform the team of the PPI safety performance detailing good practices and identifying where improvements are to be made (personnel, plant, and operational). This is cascaded down to different departments internally and externally including the Supply chain, Package managers, Works manager /SHE forum. It’s discussed in the relevant safety forums and trends can then be reviewed in the contract SHE reviews. A fully integrated approach involving people from all areas of a business ensures PPI safety gets the attention it needs to ultimately save lives on site

https://www.proximitywarning.com/data-and-performance