Computer says ‘yes’ for National Express

Technology and software don’t just make safety management easier, they ultimately make it easier for people to be safe. By making compliance less of a chore, technology can increase workforce participation in safety programs and improve morale. And for management teams with data at their disposal, number-crunching software has made it possible to take preventative action based on facts rather than reactive action based on instinct or intuition.

As anyone who has visited a health and safety exhibition recently will have seen, we’ve reached a tipping point in the industry for technology in safety management and, having traded in the filing cabinets, ring binders and photocopiers for laptops and tablets, there’s no looking back.

We launched the latest iteration of our new web-hosted safety management portal, Assure, earlier this year and were joined for the occasion by long-time customer National Express’ Bus head of safety Nigel Clamp.

National Express UK Bus carries 18m customers more than 70m miles per year and employs more than 5,000 people, and technology has become essential to managing the demanding safety challenges an operation of this scale presents.

Since Nigel’s team launched the SHE Software behavioural safety and near miss module, he says, reporting of near misses has risen from the low hundreds to the multiple thousands. “This data can be analysed right down to individual sites, enabling detailed analysis and identification of sites that are culturally not as far advanced,” says Nigel. “As it also captures all senior management interactions with the workforce, we can analyse the safety culture both from the top down and bottom up.”

Over two thousand management visits have been entered into the system by National Express UK Bus in the last year, according to Nigel, from which it has been able to identify within every department the leading safety issues and procedural failures before injury or incident occurs.

“Data analysis can show trends in incredible detail. As a result of all our approaches in this area we are now seeing reported lost time injuries nearly 90 per cent lower than levels recorded only two years ago,” says Nigel.

The SHE Software system is flexible in its reporting and analysis, and fully customisable to any organisations’ needs, to the point where National Express UK Bus has been able to pursue campaigns targeted at particular vehicles in its fleet, right down to one type of mirror or vehicle being more at risk of collision than another.

Applications specific to the challenges faced by National Express UK Bus turn up good data time and again, but the company uses SHE Software for a range of more familiar functions such as claims handling, all forms of risk assessments, including those generated in the field, as well as managing senior leadership field visits to assess or change behaviour, exercise contractor control and Construction, Design and Management CDM project work.

A key benefit, according to Nigel, is that the entire company has access to the system. “We make it as easy as possible to raise any issue from a pothole on a public highway or the failure to follow a procedure in a maintenance workshop. It can be done anonymously and all management receives copies of the data for their sites, which helps them manage issues and identify trends. It’s a highly inclusive system that has brought the workforce and the safety team much closer together.

“SHE Software took our existing system to a completely new level,” says Nigel. “Almost everything is configurable to users’ needs, whether it is the field names on a form or the names of sites within the organisation, how they are configured and how they relate to each other as well as access rights for users. Even in the way it generates reports. This means that whether you are a multinational or a single site user you can set the system to give you exactly what your business needs.”

National Express UK Bus has used technology to achieve what we consider to be the holy grail of safety management. Because it’s collecting, analysing and comparing data on near misses, the relative safety performance of branch sites and facilities, and staff training levels, it has the opportunity to positively influence behaviour. But what’s most exciting is that with scalable software solutions this can be achieved by any company regardless of size.