Arrowsight, a safety technology company specializing in behavior review/modification and video-based training analytics, has now been adopted by contractors such as Skanska, Posilico, Tutor Perini and Suffolk Construction on projects and recently signed a partnership with construction insurer Zurich. Suffolk has implemented video technology in all projects.
Arrowsight uses fixed-point cameras and human-directed video review, usually in the next morning’s three-minute jobsite safety meeting, to flag risky and exemplary safety behavior at contractor client sites every day. Unlike other security technologies designed to only detect breaches, the purpose of Arrowsight’s technology is to enable training and timely adjustments by reviewing video overnight with engineers from Arrowsight’s overseas processing center who then send a report with the previous day’s video via Microsoft PowerBi.
The Arrowsight system uses mobile, battery-powered, cellular cameras that can operate without electricity or internet in remote locations. Good behaviors are just as likely to turn into a short video the next morning as infractions.
Video courtesy of Arrowsight
From manufacturing to construction
“As with any of the industries we work in, it’s great to be able to identify things that aren’t safe and provide data for people to act on, but there’s a lot of art to figuring out how to fit into the ecosystem of a day within any industry,” says Adam Aronson, founder and CEO of Arrowsight, which first launched video inspection technology in manufacturing. “In construction, the safety toolbox meeting, which is just a matter of minutes at the beginning of the day, is really your best chance to get in there and do some training.”
The cameras are positioned to capture most of the activities taking place wherever they are installed and all video is reviewed by Arrowsight engineers in India. The Microsoft Power BI visualization provides a dashboard with analytics of everything that happened and short videos of good and bad.
A worker walking under a crane picket to remove draft is the type of situation that is commonly encountered during video that may be discussed in the safety meeting. Positive actions such as tying at height are also highlighted.
Contractors using Arrowsight have reported an increase in safety compliance from 97 to 100 percent with a 72 percent decrease in workers’ compensation claims, according to data from a multi-year pilot program in New York deploying Arrowsight cameras and training. The program included eight large-scale general building projects plus one heavy civil project, cumulatively valued at more than $2 billion.
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“It all came from a simple idea that analyzing sports and game film was so incredibly useful in football, especially, and I was just bringing it to the business world,” says Aronson, who founded several hedge funds and worked on Wall Street before starting Arrowsight in 2002. “What we’ve done in manufacturing, and then in healthcare and construction, now you identify the best things. That could happen in any industry.”
Risk reduction in construction with video review
Aronson says from a risk management perspective, things Arrowsight has helped clients with include limiting and stopping food recalls in culinary production, stopping botched surgeries in health care, and eliminating people getting hurt or killed on construction sites.
Arrowsight workplace camera
“The theme is constant, which is: figure out very small ways to feed information to your customers that don’t overwhelm them with data, and then stay with them day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter,” he says.
Skanska and Posilico were early adopters. Aronson says Suffolk’s addition helped the technology “bridge the chasm” for more contractor adoption.
“We’ve looked at security technologies, videos, image review for a long time, and we’ve tried a lot of them,” says Jit-Kee Chin, CTO of Suffolk, “What’s really good about Arrowsight is that the focus is on learning, and the tutorials really help change behaviors. It’s a pretty unique angle among a lot of security technologies.”
Aronson says the behavioral process requires work on behalf of contractor clients, but also by Arrowsight to actually get it done.
“‘[Contractors] We’re using our technology to do secure things, but actually, we look at the videos ourselves, very meticulously, not just a top-level review. We have two other people watching it,” he said. “We make sure our customers are watching the video, so we can track if they’re watching the really key videos that we select.”
Aronson says partnering with insurers like Zurich on the carrier side has made contractors take notice.
Zurich announced in November that it required Arrowsight technology for all construction projects it insures in New York. This can lead to “lower rates on your insurance packages,” he adds.
Observational security vs. reactive
On March 5, Oracle introduced its Oracle Construction and Engineering Advisor for Safety, an AI-enabled predictive intelligence platform that contractors can use to predict project safety incidents in an effort to proactively prevent accidents and support safer and more profitable jobs. Like Arrowsight, Oracle’s approach uses observational data to change behaviors anywhere.
“It flips the script from an auditor approach to measurable field engagement,” says Josh Kanner, senior vice president of AI and analytics at Oracle who developed the AI model behind the Advisor product at his startup Newmetrix. “Observation is any interaction between anyone on the site team about anything going on related to safety out there. It records a measurable field engagement. Safety is really measurable and you measure it based on how often people take risks and the observations and the types of those risks to a score that ends up being useful in predictions.”
Contractors such as Boldt and Suffolk used this data to make safety benchmarks and then a weekly safety risk forecast. Tracking incidents of varying severity allowed them to assess the safety culture at individual sites. Boldt had a 10% reduction in incident rate and a 75% reduction in workers’ compensation insurance rates. Suffolk saw a 57% reduction in the total rate of recordable incidents since the start of its surveillance programme.
“Since this statistic was benchmarked, our safety rates have improved even more,” says Jit-Kee Chin of Suffolk. “If you look back over the last five years from fiscal year 2020 to now, that rate of recordable incidents has fallen by three-fifths, it’s now closer to 70%.
He said the use of the observational security technique depends on how contractors use it and whether they are able to handle the data provided by companies such as Arrowsight and Oracle.
“It’s depth, it’s utilization,” he says. “Technology has to sit within some overall management system for safety. It has to be plugged into the workflow, so when it’s plugged into the three-minute meeting at the beginning of the day, it affects how you review incidents and how you assign extra oversight to jobs that are particularly risky. At some point it has to be built into a management system.”
He added that Suffolk’s overall safety management system including its on-site safety managers and a level of oversight among project executives helped it achieve this 70% reduction.
