Canadian Occupational Safety

28 Canadian Occupational Safety www.cos-mag.com By Mari-Len De Guzman H uge data that may be wilt- ing away in company servers could have a bigger purpose in the organization than just satisfying compliance requirements. Experts are saying it may just be the key to the age- old quest for total injury prevention. rough data analytics (also called, predictive analytics), some companies are fi nding good use for data gathered over a number of years in bringing inju- ries and fatalities down — which can only be good for the bottom line. Any- thing from safety-related stats (safety inspections, near-miss reports, lost- time injuries) to broader corporate data (employee demographic, equipment maintenance reports, performance bonuses), data experts say all have the potential to produce great intelligence for safety applications. This is what Vancouver-based mining fi rm Goldcorp has realized following a six-month pilot project in one of its mines in Ontario that put its vast corporate data to the test using Deloitte's data analytics so ware. "We looked at fi ve years of data, col- lected over two million data points, and we started to see this data is telling us something," says Paul Farrow, senior vice-president, people and safety for Goldcorp. "In some cases, (it) reinforced what we already knew but now we actually have quantitative, statistically signifi - cant data to work with; in other cases, it kind of showed us some areas which we were not expecting to see." Goldcorp took various data from the Ontario mine — including safety inci- dents, production, times, production bonuses, employee socio-demographic profi les, climate measurements, equip- ment maintenance and geo-spatial data — and fed them into the analytics pro- gram developed by Deloitte. e system then produced intelligent reporting on trends related to health and safety. In a nutshell, the data analytics provides information that allows Goldcorp to identify key drivers of safety incidents. For instance, Farrow says, through the analytics the company found cer- tain types of employees have a higher propensity to a workplace injury. "We found the work propensity for an individual to have an incident is much higher if you are single, versus married," says Farrow. "Married with children even further decreases (the propensity)." Other key drivers of incidents Goldcorp has found have to do with production and bonuses. e company found the propensity for safety-related incidents increases with bonuses. However, with the most experienced workers — and therefore the high- est bonus earners — Goldcorp sees the reverse is true, as the propensity for safety-related incidents actually decreases with this group of workers. e data analytics also found, over- all, January, March, July and September are higher-risk months for incidents. ere is an increase in incidents among aboveground employees between Sep- tember and March, while underground crew experience the highest number of incidents in July and September. On a weekly basis, higher incidents occur during Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Goldcorp also found other key drivers for incidents, including weather, hours of daylight and other environmental fac- tors; relationship between aboveground and underground workers and their propensity for injury; and the infl uence of demographic factors (marital status, experience) on incident occurrence. While getting this kind of intelli- gence from corporate data is valuable for organizations, what they do with those analytics is key to really achieving the safety performance improvements they desire, according to Dave Stewart, chief operating offi cer for Deloitte Ana- lytics based in Toronto. Organizations that are harnessing analytics capabilities in an eff ort to solve business problems tend to be more successful than those that don't understand how to leverage their data, Stewart suggests. It's an innova- tive way of looking at old problems to generate new insights in reducing Data miners Companies are gazing into the future for injury prevention Goldcorp's Porcupine Gold Mines in Timmins, Ont., where the data analytics pilot project was conducted. TECHNOLOGY

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