Barton Malow makes safety a priority. In fact, the company has a safety logo that reads: “Build it safe — No Exceptions.” Their impressive safety record, which is superior to the national average, stems from a long-term strategy that embraces in-depth, advanced planning to mitigate risk and further reduce reportable incidents.
The company was already using StructionSite to tag, store and manage images and video, including 360 degree photos, to automate their site documentation process. So, when they learned they could also use those images to find subtle signals of project risk with Newmetrix, they decided to see what our AI, which we affectionately call “Vinnie,” could do. In Q1 2019, Barton Malow deployed our Safety Monitoring module on six projects.
StructionSite and Newmetrix: Do one thing, get two things
First, let’s talk a bit about StructionSite, and how our two solutions together can enable organizations to do one thing … and get two things. Typically, when employees snap photos with their phones during walk-throughs, the images get stored in random folders where they often remain unused and unorganized.
StructionSite ensures that these site photos don’t go to waste. It automatically tags photos with their location and position on the drawings and stores all images and video in a single repository. Employees can search photos for defined keywords across all projects and easily share them with colleagues. Plus, StructionSite can provide an interactive walk-through video as a deliverable that includes an x-ray mode to see through walls and slabs.
Our completely hands-free and automatic integration with StructionSite enables Vinnie to analyze photos across all projects for subtle signals of risk and provides relative rankings of each project. Vinnie has been trained on millions of construction images to recognize site risks, such as personnel not wearing personal protective equipment (PPE), standing water, housekeeping issues and the presence of ladders.
“Reviewing the volume of photos collected at our jobs without high tech assistance would be impossible,” said Ted Jennings, virtual design and construction manager for the company. “With Vinnie, we spend less time and get a much better picture of site safety. And all of our materials are organized, located and examined.”
Project risk assessments at their fingertips
Ted and his team always have the results of Vinnie’s analysis right at their fingertips through Newmetrix’s dashboard. The dashboard provides a bundled risk score for each project, along with trend data to show how risk has changed over time. Barton Malow can compare these risk scores to the company’s own baseline, as well as to industry peer’s anonymized ratings.
Barton Malow has seen a strong correlation between a site’s safety rating and the number of reportable incidents that occur there, a correlation that other customers have also noted. As the risk score deteriorates, the number of on-site injuries increases. When the risk score improves, recordable incidents decline.
Graph showing how risk scores correlate with on-the-job injuries.
“Through the combination of StructionSite and Newmetrix, we can better evaluate what corrective actions we need to take to get us back into the green,” Jennings added. “It provides insights into areas that we otherwise would not have.”
