IT Application For Construction Safety Management: Planning, Monitoring And Trending

Construction industry is considered as one of the most complicated industries because of its uniqueness, rapid growth, and dynamic nature. All the three main resources of this industry, i.e. labor, material and equipment have their own complexity and moreover their complexity vary with environment or workplace. Complexity and dynamic nature of construction industry makes it very difficult for the department of management of the company to take care of the occupational health and safety of their employee in construction site.

Every day construction site deals with lots of activities which surround with different hazards. Most of the company has many manuals, rules, regulations, and checklists. So it is very difficult for a safety officer to remember all the things to do. So it becomes essential for a development of a tool which can remind safety officer that the activities that should be done daily, weekly and monthly. This also helps new safety officer as his tool of assistance which can remind him important jobs to be done priority wise.

According to Cheung et al. (2003) safety and health issues are of very dynamic nature in construction industry. Anytime and anywhere new hazard can be identified and accident may occur. For that purpose sometimes safety officers require expert advice and instruction. It will be advantageous for a safety officer if a tool is designed to enable online expert advice and instruction.

More over Cheung et al. (2003) emphasized on the requirement of a detector of potential risks and hazards which can able to highlight with a warning sign to the activities that required immediate corrective action.

Kartam (1997) has identified three main elements who are obligated to provide safe work environment. They are owner, contractors and regulatory agencies. All this three elements has different needs towards safety. Owner needs a tool to monitor and control safety during construction and to assess safety plans as criteria for selecting a contractor. According to Kartam (1997) contractors need a tool by which to actively integrate safety and health measures into project planning.

Mr. Bhaskar Jyoti Das conducted a study which main objective was to develop an information technology application, which can facilitate construction safety officials to manage health and safety. In order to obtain the main objective, the following sub-objectives must be fulfilled: (1) to identify and understand the safety practices; (2) determination of the system requirement; (3) design and development of the databases system to store safety information; and (4) to design and development of Information Technology (IT) application.

Conclusions

Identification of Safety Practices
After reviewing the literature in construction safety and by interviewing different safety officers, the various safety practices in construction industries are identified. Those are listed below.

- Management roles & responsibilities
- Work method statements
- Safety Planning
- Orientation
- Training
- Safety Meeting
- Toolbox Talk
- Audit of Safety Performance
- Records and Reporting
- Accident Investigation
- Health and Safety Promotion
- Development of Emergency Response Plan
- Risk identification, assessment & control
- Global minimum requirements
- Software use

These practices are used in determining the requirement of the IT application.

Determination of System Requirements
To solve all the problems mentioned above, the construction industry demands a computer application which can be used for planning, monitoring and trending.

· Linking of safety information with project scheduling software like Primavera Project Planner and Microsoft Project.
· Planning of occupational health and safety issues accordance with the project schedule.
· Activity wise citation of occupational health and safety issues for the purpose of review and discussion in safety meetings.
· Addition or modification of safety library anytime
· Safety assessments which address the specific hazards of the site
· To monitor the performance using the data gathered from safety audit.
· Using historical data, to find out the trend of safety performance.
· Remind the user for required safety practices need to perform
· User friendly and compatible with Windows operating system

Considering the above mentioned requirements as baseline, the computer application ACSM-PMT is designed and developed.

Development of the Database System
For planning, monitoring and trending, the system needs to store all the information in a safe and secure location for easy access. A database would be ideal to store all the information. Four different databases have been developed:

Project Schedule: To store the project schedule imported from Primavera Project Planner or Microsoft Project.

Safety Library: To store Hazards and their related information

Safety Records: To store the data from safety audit and accident investigation report

Utility: To store user information, administrator information, and project information.

Development of IT Application
The IT application ACSM-PMT is basically a database management application. This IT application retrieves relevant information from the Database System to present them in a familiar format based on user specifications. The application can use for planning occupational health and safety aspect accordance with the project schedule. Along with the planning, ACSM-PMT can generate work method statement for the activities. The safety audit checklist specifically directing the onsite hazards and accident investigation reports can also be generated. It gathers data from the safety audit and recalculates it in order to be displayed in safety meter graphs. Based on the data accumulated from the safety audit, the user can additionally use the application to compare the performance between various projects. In addition the system can also use for risk analysis based on the collected data from the safety audit and accident investigation report. A reminder function is developed to remind the safety officer about the onsite hazards which are also linked with the corresponding general guidelines files of the hazards for their reference.

The IT Application has been developed using Visual Basic (VB). VB 6.0 was used since it is easy to deploy the project in Microsoft Windows. VB additionally provides a very user-friendly environment. For displaying the results Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word has been used.

Evaluation
The evaluation was done in two stages i.e. system verification and system validation. For system verification, initially a case study was developed to test the system. Implementing the case study, all the functions were tested and the system was running as per expectations. All the functions gave error free results both in terms of required information and visualization. Connections and query between the databases were found to be established successfully.
Validation was carried out to determine its utility in he construction field by demonstrating the application ACSM-PMT in front of experts in the field of construction. The experts rated the applicability of the system as useful for the construction industry. On the average the system is also rated as easy to use.

His thesis abstract is copied and posted.

Abstract

Saving lives and reducing injuries is crucial for every construction business. Construction companies can save money and improve productivity by using an effective health and safety program. This thesis aims to develop IT software capable of managing health and safety issues by Planning, Monitoring and Trending/Analyzing. It is planned to be used as a supporting tool for the safety officers.

The system requirements are gathered from literature review and interviewing safety officers. Based on the requirements, the databases and the IT application are designed and developed.

This software imports project schedules from Primavera Project Planner and Microsoft Project, and links with the safety library. The user can view information regarding the risk level of on-going activities, their work method statement, and other information. The safety audit checklist and accident investigation reports can also be generated. The system additionally supports safety meter graph, and can be used to compare the safety performance of different projects.

As a final step of this work, the software has been tested for its accuracy and reliability by taking some case studies under consideration. On the brighter side, the outputs obtained for the case studies have been quite satisfactory. This implementation of the software on case studies and the outputs thus obtained have been demonstrated in front of experts in the field of construction for their much sought after comments and suggestions. Based on feedback from the experts, it can be concluded that the system can be successfully used in real-time for planning, monitoring and trending/analyzing safety performance in construction industry.