Downer leverages AI analytics to drive Zero Harm productivity

28/03/2022

At Downer, keeping our people and communities safe is our number one priority – and we are constantly looking for new and improved ways of achieving this goal.

In 2021, we partnered with Microsoft and IT services specialist, Crayon, to build an AI-powered Zero Harm management system that will help keep our people safe by providing faster access to Critical Control than ever before. 

When a Downer employee is logging information about the day’s work, or looking retrospectively at incident reports, the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning (ML) natural language processing model can take these input documents and automatically identify the risks our employee might be exposed to and the control that will mitigate those risks. The purpose of the AI is to identify such risks and therefore our people can eliminate the exposure of hazards for frontline workers. 

This is not only aligned to our Safety Pillar, it is also a great example of our Thought Leadership Pillar. It is an innovative approach that helps keep our people safe and also save time on the job and make our data work harder for us. 

“Our vision is that the work we do will, over time, feed into frontline decision support systems that help our teams decide on the best way to do their work when they need to do it, and give them up-to-date best practice and consolidated lessons learnt on how to do it well,” Downer’s General Manager of Zero Harm Risk, Mathew Hancock, says.

“We learn an incredible amount every year, and smarter systems will help us systematise these lessons and get them to the people who need them when they need them.

“We also want it to be really easy to keep track of what is and isn’t happening, and to check if what is being done is working. If we can learn which things work really well in an easy and unobtrusive way and share this efficiently with others doing the same work in real time, we could see amazing benefits in Zero Harm performance and productivity.” 

“If we can learn which things work really well in an easy and unobtrusive way and share this efficiently with others doing the same work in real time, we could see amazing benefits in Zero Harm performance and productivity.”

This approach also allows Downer to focus on the specific needs and fast-track the outcomes of the Communities of Practice we have established around particular risks and work activities. Jo Flitcroft, Group General Manager Zero Harm Systems and Projects says “The NPL tool has significantly improved our ability to get across large volumes of information, the time saved through this tool cannot be overstated, it’s been game changing”.

“We have Communities of Practice – groups of subject matter experts – across key critical risk activities. For example, Working at Heights, Working with Electricity, Driving Vehicles, Fires and Explosions, and Hazardous Chemicals,” Mathew says.

“These groups of people are articulating in detail the types of risks we have to manage across the company within their subject matter area, verifying all the different types of controls that could be put in place and working through which control strategies are most appropriate for each type of risk.

“We are then going to start connecting all our documentation into this framework, starting with our frontline safe work method statements.”

You can read the full article on how Downer has leveraged these analytics to increase our Zero Harm productivity here.