INTEGRATING CONSTRUCTION SAFETY AND PROJECT PERFORMANCE THROUGH SAFETY INFORMATION MANAGEMENT IN AN INDUSTRIAL CONSTRUCTION COMPANY

摘要

Safety infractions in industrial construction not only cause human injuries but also lead to lost time, cost increases, and a compromised reputation for the contractor company. Safety management plans are usually limited to governmental and standard construction safety regulations which do little to promote accident and incident prevention. A major industrial construction contractor is implementing a new approach to safety planning which integrates safety into other managerial areas such as planning and control. Its aim is to provide a history of safety performance of the company and its subcontractors and through analysis measure the causes (Leading Indicators) that originate from management decisions and to distinguish the managerial areas of risk which are root causes of injuries and incidents. Based on this approach, a safety information management system was developed in order to integrate safety and management related data and provide a single source of access which brings value for identifying, measuring, reporting, and analyzing data. The information management system facilitates knowledge discovery and data mining analysis to uncover management pitfalls and provides adequate feedback, by which management can take corrective actions to maximize safety performance on projects. The system has been in use for more than a year and all the safety incidents and leading indicators information from all the ongoing projects has been collected. This paper focuses on the progress of system development and data collection, it presents the key project performance factors integrated with safety information tracked by the system and some of initial trends that could be observed by analyzing these indicators. It also discusses future research and development plans for the system.