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Analyzing industry-wide accident data can help companies prevent mishaps and save lives
Digital transformation is changing customer experiences, business models, and operations across most industries. In the crane industry, companies can analyze digital data from past accidents to help build a culture that continuously improves safety. That kind of safety culture prevents accidents, saves lives, and reduces the likelihood of lawsuits.
Establishing an effective process for continuous safety improvement requires a company to transform its mindset from simply complying with safety regulations to becoming a holistic safety culture that makes safety a top priority.
In making that cultural shift, a company uses advanced tools like risk analytics to look at the causes of past accidents and near misses so it can reduce or eliminate them in order to avoid future accidents. In a true safety culture, legal compliance is a natural outcome instead of the primary driver.
Another key factor in that vital transformation is reshaping people’s behavior, your processes, and your technology, based on the factors that risk analytics tell you are most likely to cause accidents.
People, Process and Technology
Successful safety culture transformation relies on the people who are involved at all stages of your transformation, the processes that your company sets up to enable your people to be effective, and the technology choices that enable your risk analytics to help drive the transformation.
The most commonly desired outcomes of culture transformation are enabled by this combination of people, process, and technology. Recent multi-million-dollar “nuclear verdicts” in crane accident lawsuits and today’s challenging crane insurance market make it vital that crane companies transform to a true safety culture.
Effective crane safety sits at the intersection of your people and process. Risk analytics tell a company which changes in behaviors and processes will do the most to reduce its risk of accidents.
Making those changes requires a crane company to break away from the status quo and mentality of “this is how we have always done things.”
Results come faster when you get the best out of your risk process and technology. But merely developing and deploying automated software won’t do the job. You need to measurably reduce crane risk factors so that your employees go home the way they came to work.
Life-saving safety innovations come from your people applying the technology. The more data they put into the system, the more information the program can analyze in order to recommend, in real time, ways to reduce your risks.
Risk analytics models can help crane organizations use data, experiment, and innovate much faster than they could before. Fast access to those analytics lets a crane organization and its employees improve risk management faster and more effectively than ever before, since the data tells which changes will do the most good.
As a result, continuous safety improvement becomes a daily part of crane operations.
A Model for Organizational Change Management
Is using risk analytics to upgrade safety culture different from any other organizational change management project?
Experience shows that people resist transforming safety culture essentially the same as they resist any major enterprise transformation. Consequently, we overcome the resistance with the same tools used in change management and process re-engineering. Let’s examine the phases of transition from the employee’s perspective:
Phase 1: Initial excitement
In the early phase, people are excited and open minded about the benefits the transformation will bring the company. Once more details emerge they start asking how the initiative will impact their roles. They become more informed and more inquisitive. They start to realize the potential consequences on their day-to-day duties and responsibilities.
Behavior may then shift from cooperation to resistance. People commonly seek refuge in multiple forms of denial, such as rejection and diversion. They believe that “this too shall pass” and “we’re special – crane safety culture won’t work in our unique work situation.”
Phase 2: Realization of effort and complexity
The realization phase is the most critical time in adopting the new culture. If questions go unanswered, employees build their own narratives, almost always ill-informed. Fear and panic can thwart motivation.
Staff may handicap themselves or their teams with unrealistic goals and poorly thought-out plans. They may seek delay tactics, such as extensive analysis, over-engineering, or unneeded complexity.
Their personal goals no longer align with the company’s. They seek to preserve the status quo regardless of their employers’ business objectives.
Phase 3: Integration
Eventually, the chaos of realization passes. Integration is the phase where employees and other stakeholders discover how culture transformation through real-life, real-time analytics affects them and their safety.
The group learns that culture skills via real time analytics are in high demand and increase their value in the market. Your people start to have a vested interest in positive risk-culture outcomes, and try to align to the company’s new way of thinking.
Team members may need more support than you’d expect. They can become easily frustrated when things fail to work perfectly the first time. Although team members may feel good, they are also concerned that the new culture may fail, forcing them back to the uncertainties of the realization phase. Employees need assurances and new analytics methods for forging through the unplanned difficulties of this phase.
Phase 4: New confidence and continuous improvement
Finally, your workforce accepts continuous improvement through ongoing risk analysis as a normal process of your business.
When the culture change is well assimilated, your workers engage deeply with risk analytics. Their performance aligns fully with continuous risk-improvement practices. Team members feel a sense of accomplishment and are open and honest about what is at stake.
Workforce leaders directly involved in the project start to actively recruit new believers. Their implementation crawl evolves into more of a fast walk or slow jog, as culture transformation becomes contagious throughout your organization.
The Origins of Crane Risk Analytics
Cranes are as unique and fascinating as the forensic accident details involved when things don’t go as planned. Equally fascinating are the origins of qualified crane risk analytics — which are well accepted by industry authorities and recognized by major academic institutions.
An extensive study that combined detailed engineering analysis of crane accidents in accordance with the ASME B30.5-2007, duties and responsibilities standards, set the stage for the lifting industry’s only publication analyzing the causes and trends of crane accidents.
Dr. Jim Wiethorn created this one-of-a-kind, 10-year study in order to evaluate a broad cross section of crane accidents throughout the United States. His aim was to provide the crane industry with constructive information about the factors that cause crane accidents.
CRL Crane Risk
Information Exchange
The new CRL Crane Risk Information Exchange started with the detailed data Dr. Wiethorn developed and analyzed during his decade-long research project.
The database will grow as CRL continually adds new data about crane accidents and about safe lifts (for example, tonnage lifted without incident). The purpose is to provide more data and current data to analyze for Crane Risk Predictive Analytics.
The more data the analytic process can evaluate, the more accurately it can predict which factors lead to accidents and which factors lead to safe lift. New non-accident data will be added to the database as quickly as possible, and new accident data will be added as it’s received.
The resulting analysis will help crane owners, users, manufacturers, and standards committees to reduce future risks. The information will be exchanged through the new Federation for Crane Risk Improvement.
The expressed intention of this innovative Federation model is to bring diverse crane owners together to leverage the power of shared data. Sharing ongoing operational risk intelligence (with proper anonymity) will help save lives and contain litigation.
This operational risk intelligence sharing is designed specifically as a means to counteract legal market conditions with recurring ‘Nuclear Verdicts’, in addition to today’s disruptive crane insurance market conditions.
Knowledge is truth, and sharing knowledge amongst peer organizations can accelerate our industry to consciously establish a basis for continual improvement in legal and insurance conditions for crane owners.
Crane accidents are extremely costly:
In human injury or loss of life
In damage to property, equipment, and vehicles, both on site and nearby
In downtime and loss of productivity
In legal expense and OSHA defense
Crane risk analytics can help prevent crane accidents and related losses.
It helps crane owners prevent accidents by giving them the most thorough, accurate, and current evaluation of accident causes.
My 25+ years of crane risk management experience working with owners, users, and manufacturers, has taught me that everyone in crane operations should use crane risk analytics to reduce or, ideally eliminate, catastrophic events and protect workers from harm.
Crane risk analytics can provide valuable information to assist crane industry stakeholders in our mutual quest to help create a safer workplace and successful lifting environment.
The safer workplace that crane risk analytics helps create enables workforce members to go home in the same health as when they came to work.
There is a vast amount of research information available on crane risk analytics to understand and to put to use in crane operations.
Kevin Cunningham is president and CEO of Crane Risk Logic Inc., and has 27 years of experience in crane risk management.
