Safety is vital to Aurizon, Australia’s largest freight operator, and one of their core values. They recognize that they cannot achieve operational performance or maintain a social license to operate unless they ensure the safety of their employees, contractors and communities.
However, due to the regional and remote locations of their operations, road safety remains one of the key risks for employees. Employees need vehicles to move freight, meet trains and access their extensive rail network to undertake maintenance. Their 24-hour operations also increase the risk of fatigue and hazards related to night-time driving.
Aurizon sought a solution to help them accelerate the ongoing development of their strong safety culture, reduce the cost of fleet operations and improve compliance across its operations.
ERM previously helped the company with the initial implementation of their Safety, Health and Environmental Management (SHEM) system, supporting the management of incidents, hazards, near misses and safety interactions, and was a natural choice to continue to work with as they looked to expand it.
Capturing the right data
Supporting the existing overall SHEM System, ERM designed the process of collecting real time data from an In-Vehicle Monitoring System (IVMS) installed on approximately 1,100 vehicles and trucks, specifically focusing on safety attributes including speed, vehicle breaking characteristics, driver fatigue, and seat belt use.
With ERM’s combination of safety domain expertise and systems experience, we were able to build an integration engine that captures the sensor feed to specifically carve out safety level data points and transfer those into the SAP Incident Management solution and safety dashboards. This resulted in a single point of management and reporting of health and safety information throughout the company built into the existing system.
This allowed them to actively manage, investigate and report all safety performance while providing visual and audible alerts to drivers to improve safety – all without requiring any additional work from employees.
Our work together continues to support ongoing improvement of incident management processes, tools, mobile reporting functionality and overall performance improvements.
Increased safety visibility through a streamlined system
Aurizon is now operating a fully integrated IVMS that captures and reports all safety related events from their Australia-wide fleet in a single system. The system provides:
- A reliable automated recording and notification on all road incidents across the organization
- The ability to manage road incidents in line with the company’s safety guidelines
- Extended HSE reporting and analytics to support data based decision making for road and vehicle safety considerations.
Following commencement of IVMS reporting in February 2016, there was a 97% reduction in all unsafe driving breaches. Working with ERM, Aurizon is strengthening their safety culture without compromising operations.
