Adelaide Brighton Cement

C A S E S T U D Y

Company: Adelaide Brighton Cement

Challenges:

Adelaide Brighton Cement, like many public

companies is concerned with continuously

reducing workplace injuries and hazards.

While hazard and injury reports were being

captured, there was insufficient visibility to and

analysis of that information to support a

continuous improvement approach.

Solution:

The myDIALS Operational Performance

Optimization Platform was deployed very

quickly. Metrics are extracted and

calculated from multiple data sources

including from internal systems and

spreadsheets and made available for

display and drill-down analysis.

Results:

The incident and hazard reporting culture has

improved significantly. Supervisors now have

access to more detailed and timely information

enabling them to lead the drive to improve

safety and eliminate hazards.

Now myDIALS is being extended to additional

areas such as order and dispatch data to

optimize the performance of the production

scheduling and shipping departments.

During the past decade business and government interest in employee safety has jumped several notches, making occupational health and safety (OH&S) an essential concern for any organization. These days business partners, shareholders, customers and the community at large are just as likely to be influenced by an organization’s OH&S reputation as they are by its bottom line. The management at Adelaide Brighton Cement understands this only too well. Part of the publicly listed Adelaide Brighton group, the company is one of the leading providers of cement to the Australian construction, engineering and infrastructure industries. Its employees operate in a production environment defined by heavy machinery and high temperatures – a combination that could easily prove risky without thorough safety measures. In 2008 Adelaide Brighton Cement's Angaston plant embarked on a new approach to reducing workplace injuries and hazards. It began with the appointment of Vince Aurora to the role of plant manager. Aurora had previously been employed as the Angaston production manager. He had a good understanding of the safety and performance data relating to production activities and was experienced in using the company's SQL database to obtain hazard and injury reports. While the database was not particularly user friendly and it was impossible to drill down into reports for additional detail, the database did play an important part in notifying a broad range of management and staff when safety incidents occurred. However, with his newly expanded role Aurora had assumed responsibility for a number of additional departments. He didn't have the luxury of in-depth historical knowledge of each department and he soon realized that if safety was to continue to improve, he required something more than the database. “We needed to be able to visualize the data that was being reported, but we certainly didn't want a complete ERP software implementation,” Aurora explains. “We wanted a solution that was innovative but also quick to install.” After investigating the market, Aurora selected myDIALS, a business intelligence solution that could take input from any of the Angaston plant's existing data sources and present it in a series of interactive, online dashboards complete with highlighted key performance indicators. The solution offered Aurora the ability to create a real-time snapshot of critical safety, hazard and environment data for all relevant staff and management. “The important thing with myDIALS,” Aurora continues, “was that it would display and provide drill-down access to information from the systems that we already had.” As a hosted solution, deployment offered minimal risk: the cost was low compared to other software solutions and deployment required no major overhaul of existing systems. “All we had to do was provide a copy of the database and a secure connection for myDIALS. The software then takes data from the database and eight separate spreadsheets and reports it all on a single dashboard. Within five weeks we were up and running. It was very quick,” Aurora comments. Immediacy of OH&S information and the ability to analyze data have been amongst the biggest benefits arising from the new software. “The interface is crisp, clean and easy to understand. Even the back end is designed for a simple end user, not a technology freak, so it is very easy to go in and modify the dashboard. We can slice and dice data as never before. Plus the dashboard gives live information every time an incident is raised. We never used to see this kind of reporting in anything other than monthly reports,” he adds. Since deployment, management has seen an increase in reporting culture at the Angaston plant. Hazard identification doubled in 2008 while incident reporting improved by seventy percent. A new cross-functional weekly OH&S review meeting has been instituted to help manage the increase in reports and to ensure follow-up action where required. The supervisors who attend these meetings are leading the plant's drive to improve safety and eliminate hazards. Aurora points out, “We could only get to this level once we started to get reliable, real time information.” With OH&S improving, Aurora is now turning his attention to other responsibilities. He is now incorporating dispatch data in the dashboard so that the sales personnel can more easily monitor customer order status. Metrics such as tonnes of product, by-product, the site, weighbridge and potentially even the silo involved in shipping will be recorded and updated hourly so that plant managers can better plan and allocate production scheduling. The ultimate aim is to ensure that customers never run out of product.

United States

1-866-99DIALS

(1-866-993-4257)

www.mydials.com

Australia

+61 (0) 7 3118 5013