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Alcumus Info Exchange Ferrovial Case Study

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Alcumus Info Exchange helps eliminate risk for global infrastructure giants

One of the world’s leading infrastructure and service operators, Ferrovial, has been committed to developing innovative and sustainable solutions since 1952. The company, which has a presence in over 15 countries, carries out activities through four main business lines including maintenance and services, toll road investments, construction design and airport operation. Ferrovial Agroman is the construction arm of the group and has been well established in the UK & Ireland since 2002.

Ensuring Company Values

As Ferrovial Agroman works in an extremely high risk industry, health and safety is its biggest concern. In fact, Declan Davis, Assistant HSQE Director at Ferrovial Agroman UK and Ireland, stipulates that health and safety is a core value that’s woven into the entire company: “Alongside delivering the best service to our clients, our mission is to ensure our employees get home safe from work every night.  Their lives should never be at risk when working on one of our construction sites, which is why we need to ensure our health and safety policies are precise and compliant at all times, whilst also keeping track of possible threats.”

With health and safety forming of the core of Ferrovial Agroman’s values, it’s important the organisation can keep up to date with every reported incident to ensure any trending occurrences are carefully monitored.  To help them do this, Ferrovial Agroman enlisted the help of leading compliance and risk management software business, Alcumus, and its innovative information management system, Alcumus Info Exchange 2 (IE2)

Trend Spotting and Incident Prevention

By adopting IE2, Ferrovial Agroman was able to replace its in-house reporting system, and allow for a far more in-depth account.  The Info Exchange system analyses data in meticulous detail and provides a highly-effective monitoring function, which allows the company to capture any trends and, therefore, predict and prevent new incidents occurring. The system also enables the firm to identify areas of the business that could benefit from further enhancement, as well as indicating any positive changes in the company’s incident reporting.
 
Commenting on why Ferrovial Agroman adopted Info Exchange, Declan said: “Before IE2 we used to report using a comprehensive in-house system. Nevertheless, in line with a culture of continuous improvement, we felt there was more that we could be doing as we strive for best practice. The key benefit from Info Exchange is that our data is now far more powerful. It automatically takes our figures and presents them in a way that makes it possible to quickly spot trends, or areas that need addressing.”





Effective Data Sharing

In addition to this, IE2 is making significant improvements with Ferrovial Agroman’s joint ventures.  Now customary practice for the UK’s largescale infrastructure schemes Ferrovial Agroman will often partner with other leading contractors.  In such instances, the sharing of information between partners can be a challenge. Each partnering company not only required access to any data collected, but they also need it to be reported with their specific terminology and analytical preferences. 
 
Before the installation of IE2, Ferrovial Agroman would be required to manually enter the database two or three times, depending on the number of companies involved in the joint venture. Data sharing in this way can be an extremely inefficient use of resource, leaves margin for human error and reduces effectiveness of operation.  On understanding the challenge faced by Ferrovial Agroman and indeed, the industry, Alcumus was able to create a bespoke piece of software that allowed the data collected to feed all parties directly, ensuring the individual analytical and terminology requirements are met. 
 
Declan added: “We knew there must be a more resourceful and timely technique to share data, so when we started utilising Info Exchange, we quickly sought advice from Alcumus as we were confident this was something they could resolve and deliver.  Sharing data between two or three different companies is an extremely common process in the industry these days, especially with the increase in British infrastructure. So it’s important to have software that allows companies to do this.”

Zero Incident Goals

Since the introduction of IE2 Ferrovial Agroman has also noticed an increase in near-miss reporting, and improved quality of reports from employees. The fact that IE2 clearly results in process improvements and incident reductions encourages employees to report, whilst also making key elements mandatory and ensuring all reports are accurate and correct. In addition, Alcumus has  launched a user-friendly mobile app, which helps to reflect real-time reporting and ensures a far more accessible approach for employees.
 
Declan commented: “It’s vital that near misses are recorded so we can prevent them from happening again. Our goal is to achieve a zero incident environment for all of our sites and we’re hoping Info Exchange can help us succeed. We have implemented a number of improvements to how near-misses are reported over the years. IE2 has been instrumental in driving this change and we can now see one near miss report for every 700 hours worked. ”






Joining Forces

Alan Neill, SVP of Software Solutions at Alcumus, commented: “The reporting of health and safety and risk management is often not seen as essential, however, as Ferrovial Agroman has demonstrated, preventing more serious accidents from occurring is largely down to how the smaller incidents are reported.
 
“The ability to share reliable, accurate data is becoming increasingly important and those demands will continue to place pressure on firms like Ferrovial Agroman. The future of the construction, engineering and manufacturing industries is likely to require increased business collaboration through joint ventures, which places further demand for systems that enable streamlined data sharing in real-time.  At a time when the government is calling for an increase in British infrastructure, it’s vital that sharing data and effective communication is made simple and hassle free, encouraging companies to join forces on large-scale projects.”

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