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When we look at the construction industry as a whole, we start to see a common issue. Over the past year, labor productivity has increased across the globe, and manufacturing has shot up. Yet, construction has grown a mere 1% annually. The same gap that permeates the construction industry's growth and cash flow frictions is rearing its head in safety and risk mitigation. Construction is resistant to change.
The majority of construction firms use archaic risk prediction models based on historical data. Unfortunately, these older prediction models aren't driving construction safety; they're holding firms back from making meaningful changes to their safety infrastructure.
Resistance to Change is Impacting Construction Safety
Obviously, there are physical factors that create safety incidents at construction sites. But, these labor-intensive processes aren't necessarily to blame for worksite safety incidents. In fact, manufacturing and production see significantly fewer workplace injuries, and fatalities each year, despite involving many similar physical processes.
There's another semi-hidden problem at play, and it's the same problem that's slowing construction growth: digital transformation. Construction is one of the least digitally transformed industries on the globe. Manufacturing and production companies, on the other hand, have invested heavily in new technology. It's a tale of two vastly different cities. Construction has failed, thus far, to make significant strides in analytics and data organization. And it costs the industry money, productivity, and safety. The cure for almost all of these issues, begins with a platform that understands your data, so you can make the right decisions.
Safety & Analytics: A Convergence of Forces
The problem here is that most construction companies are approaching safety in a historical manner. This is a dangerous, costly, and inaccurate way to understand your current safety ecosystem. Not only does historical analysis rely heavily on making mistakes to feed data into your safety programs, but it only tells you how safety incidents happened in a small window. For example, it's relatively easy to understand what contributed to a safety incident from an employee perspective. Fatigue may play a role, you may have data that shows the value of workplace training, or you may discover that employee age is related to workplace safety. That's all valuable, but it doesn't empower you to do better in the future.
What about job site layout, scheduling, financial data, weather, and labor dispersion? Analytics help you understand the larger safety picture while also giving you the tools and resources you need to accurately define risk, budget for risk, and mitigate risk within each project. Predictive analytics converge data sources to give you a comprehensive, nuanced, and holistic view of your overall safety structure. This not only helps you keep your workers safe, it prevents fines and reputation damage, but it feeds back into the financial process to give you a better understanding of your contingency cushion — which makes your forecasts more accurate, project success more likely, and cashflow more robust.
Briq's platform can help you understand your market and tap into all of your data sources to help you better understand your safety needs. Briq goes well beyond forecasting and discovery; to rally data behind an easily-searchable and highly transparent lens. Check it out yourself.
