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North West Gas Alliance

Challenge: To ensure safe working practices and effective site supervision across 500 sites where gas reinstatement and replacement operations are carried out.

Solution: A solution incorporating a digital pen to enable information captured during weekly safety inspections to be recorded and coaching to be delivered.

Benefits: Near instant access to field data, increased accuracy and reduced administration costs.

Download the full case study as a PDF document here.

Customer

The North West Gas Alliance (NWGA) is tasked with a £380m reinstatement and replacement of
3,500km of gas mains in the North West of England. NWGA is an alliance of National Grid,
who owns the gas network, and Balfour Beatty, the prime engineering contractor.

Current operations are carried out over 500 sites in the region, comprising of 20 engineering
sub-contractors and over 5000 contract workers.

Challenge

To ensure safe working practices and zero accident frequency rate (AFR) across the 500 sites.

A conventional site safety approach had reduced the recorded instances of poor working practice
(non-compliances) reported by independent auditors to 700 during 2006, but was failing to deliver
further significant improvements.

The 30 roving site supervisors were unable to demonstrate that they were correcting unsafe
working practices and effectively coaching their teams on safe working.

Solution

The business process was reviewed and found that the following issues contributed to the main cause of the problem:

• Remote field working caused information to be reported ineffectively
• Time delays in information returned to the management
• There was no formal mechanism for on-site supervisors to record issues
• Issues were being found and rectified on site by supervisors, but not recorded – thereby hiding the true nature of the problem

A lightweight process has been developed to enable the 30 roving site supervisors to conduct weekly safety conversations with their teams in the field, and to record instances of safe and unsafe practice.

The supervisors use their digital pen to record the conversation onto coaching forms that are retained by the teams and form the basis of their safety performance feedback.

Crucially, the process, training and the design of the coaching form encourages the supervisor to ‘tell the truth’ and record any issues found, and then correct and close that issue whilst still on site.

The information captured by the supervisor is immediately transmitted from the pen to a central system and is used to generate an up to the minute management report on safety issues in the business.

Benefits of this approach

The digital pen technology deployed in the field supports the conversational style of the process, and enables the supervisor complete freedom to capture whatever information is appropriate in order to deliver feedback to his teams.

Use of paper-based coaching forms ensured that the teams retains a paper-based record of feedback provided to them each week, which is easy to review without the use of any additional equipment, both by the teams and by the visiting supervisor.

The regular and on-going nature of the reviews conducted by the supervisor helps ensure that performance improvement needs are monitored and appropriate consequences can be delivered by the supervisor to the teams.

The immediacy of the data which is delivered back to the management of the business ensures that the management is up to date with safety issues out in the field, and that the management can appropriately support their field supervisors.

The digital pen has been extremely reliable in use. Feedback from the supervisors indicates that it is very easy to use, just like a normal pen and paper.