According to Forbes, 40% of businesses never reopen after a disaster – and of those who do, only 29% are still operational two years later. With COVID-19 looming, this is a significant threat to any business operation, in particular now that employees, communities, and authorities are paying close attention to the actions taken by organizations to keep their employees safe.
So, how can you take the right actions and reassure all stakeholders?
In today’s day and age, there is increasing market pressure due to rapidly changing end-customer needs, a growing competitive pressure and commoditization of portfolios – and with an aging workforce, it is becoming more complicated to attract and retain the right talent.
That means that COVID-19 aside, in today’s fast-paced economy, challenges abound, and agile organizations that have the ability to quickly adapt to market changes have competitive advantages over their peers.
With some countries just starting to come out of quarantine, COVID-19 is an additional layer of complexity we are all faced with. But what does that mean for your business?
Responding to COVID-19, recovery planning, and becoming operationally resilient
All operations are under scrutiny. To safely restart and recover, in a controlled and monitored manner, digital technology solutions are the key to an efficient, effective, and scalable approach.
Three main focus areas include:
- Ensuring the measures defined by authorities such as safety distancing, temperature checks, and contact tracking are in place for workers on site
- Connecting workers in the field to remote experts and digital standard operating procedures (SOPs)
- Detecting safety incidents and security breaches autonomously (i.e., not just automatically, but with minimal human intervention) and anonymously
To help organizations leverage the challenging situation and use it as an opportunity not only to restart operations and activities but to become operationally resilient, dss+ has decided to put its cultural transformation and operations risk management experience together with tech-enabled solutions. The result is a Fast-Track Program that allows clients to extract additional value from the mitigation actions beyond mere compliance.
Tech-enabled solutions and proven methodologies for a more agile approach
Building on dss+ experience, the recommended strategy combines culture, risk-based, and tech-based approaches.
This means factoring in mindsets and behaviours as well as risk controls alongside capabilities and competencies, processes and technology, and governance and management, adding four elements related to technology:
- Using data analytics for better decisions
- Digitizing man-machine interactions to lower the risks
- Digitizing the risk management process to increase efficiency
- Using technology to improve Learning and Development
Based on dss+ projects experience, this will make your risk reduction journey 1.5-2x more efficient, and culminate in faster and more transparent decision-making.
To go from a theoretical concept to a hands-on solution, dss+ has identified five vendors from the SafetyTech.ai marketplace who can continue to keep workers safe amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
Specific vendors to keep workers safe during COVID-19 & how to implement their solutions
Revisiting the three areas of focus identified above, here is how the highlighted vendors address and provide solutions related to each topic.
Romware is a Belgium-based company that has developed a solution package, building on its product initially being used to monitor access to unauthorized or restricted areas, to trace employees on site in consideration of the COVID-19 circumstances.
They provide a wearable device, a notification dashboard, and an analytics platform. This enables you to monitor physical distancing, notify workers involved in case of an issue, and to control measure compliance by monitoring company-wide performance of risk containment measures.
Eleksen is a product from UK-based Wearable Technologies Limited who have added a social distancing solution to their existing connected industrial worker solution product. The ELEKSEN Safer Space detects one worker encroaching on another worker’s 4m and 2m spaces.
This solution may enable large industrial customers to stay open or expedite their reopening when the lockdown restrictions are eased. Furthermore, as their connected industrial worker solution is already in the market and serving sectors such as oil & gas, construction, utilities, and warehousing, to any organization already using their solution, this is effectively an additional module that can be added to the existing platform.
SmarTECHS is an American company run by a team of veterans that develops Augmented Reality (AR) enabled wearable solutions for field technicians to make their work safer, faster, and correct from the get-go. It also facilitates hands-free collaboration with remote experts.
By allowing voice to text dictation (noisy environments included), the visualization of instructions, data capture, and hands-free work, SmarTECHs is on a mission to help businesses unlock the full potential of their frontline teams through smart technologies – while keeping them safe.
Atollogy is a US-based company that leverages machine and visual learning to convert data into actionable intelligence, in this case using visual analytics to detect safe distancing between employees, triggering notifications if the requirements are not respected.
They are revolutionizing how companies manage operations by integrating the physical world with artificial intelligence (AI). What’s more, their solution works with any model of any equipment (even vintage), can be deployed in hours, and promises data results in 10 days.
Bleenco is a Germany-based company that utilizes camera detection to improve workers’ safety and provide an accident-free workspace. Its ready-to-go solution uses AI to monitor safety and health compliance, including an employee temperature screening.
The solution includes a detection system that verifies whether workers within a perimeter are properly wearing safety equipment as well as analysis on workers’ bodies to assess ergonomics at work. It also enables Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) specialists to automize safety compliance processes and boost efficiency in preventing accidents.
Promising but overwhelming? You may be wondering how these solutions can all connect to the organization’s safety systems – and what about the people?
The dss+ Fast-Track Program is available for a successful and sustainable implementation of such novel technologies within your organizational landscape.
In as little as four weeks, the dss+ team will work with you through three phases:
- Engage, envision, prepare – To engage the right people, define use cases (situations) where the technology can support the required actions and establish success criteria alongside expectations.
- Pilot & evolve – To establish a commitment to the solution by the vendor, the organization’s leadership team, and its workers. This is the step where technology is tested, and the change management process involved in its implementation is assessed and planned.
- Evaluate, validate, and scale – To foster acceptance and adoption of the new technology based on the learnings from the pilot, revisiting the level of impact versus expectations, and devising processes adjustments to enable any desired improvements.
[For more information, reach out to the dss+ team for a more detailed and customized proposal.]
The five vendors described above have already been identified as capable of “fast-tracking” their solutions with the dss+ methodology.
So, the question is: will your organization be one of the entities to not only recover from COVID-19, but leverage the opportunity to improve your operational resilience and worker safety?
Contact dss+ to find out more about how we can support you in your efforts and enable a more agile approach for more impactful outcomes.
