SafetiBase
In our recent free webinar: 3D Repo for Health and Safety, special guest speaker and Digital Engineering Manager at Atkins, Zane Ulhaq, talked about SafetiBase and how it came to be what it is today.
SafetiBase has come together via a consortium of industry partners including Atkins, Costain, Mott MacDonald, Laing O’Rourke, UCL, Balfour Beatty, Bentley, HS2, Tideway, The Institution of Engineering and Technology, and Vinci.
What was the problem facing the industry? Health and safety information in construction can be complicated, unstructured, and disconnected. Risk registers are the ‘go-to’ tool, but the format of a risk register can vary between person to person, project to project, and even within the same organisation. After a look around the industry, it was evident that many others were also looking for a better way to manage health and safety information.
Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel or further fragment the industry, the consortium decided to work as a team to bring together some best practices for the whole of the construction industry to benefit from.
Rather than coming up with a big idea with no survey information to prove whether there was a genuine problem facing the industry or not, the team performed a quick trial to help decide if the project should go ahead. To do this, they decided to port a list of health and safety risks from the Thames Tideway West project over to HS2 to investigate. The investigation revealed a lot of manual processing and thought were required and proved there was a need for a better solution.
The consortium decided that whatever they provided, it should be simple, structured, and connected.
To tackle this issue team started looking at developing a solution through three phases including:
Phase 1: Extract data and develop the interface.
Phase 2: Integrate opensource cloud system
Phase 3: Develop a dashboard platform and automation
Rather than be flavoured by one organisation, consultancy, or contractor in the industry, the work on SafetiBase follows the industry standard of PAS 1192-6.
The next step was to implement a web-based platform, which in this case is 3D Repo’s digital construction platform as opposed to creating an independent viewer. With 3D Repo’s open API, this also means that the user can view this information in their native Revit modelling system.
For further analysis of the data made available through SafetiBase, users are then able to connect to business intelligence tool Microsoft Power BI to make custom dashboards and gain better insights.
To further increase the benefit of SafetiBase, the consortium has been fortunate enough to work alongside the Health and Executive (HSE) through the Discovering Safety programme. A recent initiative has been the creation of health and safety risk treatment suggestions.
Moving into the future, the project team hope to be able to automatically create lists of risks based on how models are put together, auto-mitigate against those risks and drive industry solutions for everyone to benefit from.
To find out more about SafetiBase visit: https://www.safetibase.org
Or contact 3D Repo at support@3drepo.com
