Tag Archives: big data

Data Never Sleeps: The Role of Big Data and Leadership Analytics in Shaping Safety Management Programs

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Data in Safety Management Programs

A wise man once said: “You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data” (in this case, the wise man was Daniel Keys Moran, a US-based computer programmer and science fiction writer).

In this day and age, you don’t have to be a scientist to understand the power of data. It is everywhere from our work environments to our personal lives. Let’s face it—how many of us would be willing to change our habits when it comes to our smart phones? That being the case, it should come as no surprise that data has found its rightful place in safety management as well.


What the Experts are Saying


But don’t just take my word for it. Safety expert Chuck Pettinger, Ph.D., Process Change Leader for Predictive Solutions Corp. is a long-time champion of data-driven safety management programs. According to him, there is a need for safety … Read more...

World Quality Day 2019: Leading Quality for 100 Years

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World Quality Day – November 14 – provides a forum to reflect on how we can implement more effective processes and systems that positively impact KPIs and business results.

Each year, the second Thursday of November is set aside to reflect on the way quality management can contribute to our work and our lives. Led by the Chartered Quality Institute (CQI) in the United Kingdom, World Quality Day provides a forum to reflect on how we can implement more effective processes and systems that positively impact KPIs and business results — and celebrate outcomes and new insights.

This year’s theme marks the centennial of the CQI’s efforts to grow and expand attention to quality across the United Kingdom and in Europe.

We usually think of quality as an operations function. The quality system (whether we have quality management software implemented or not) helps us keep track of the health and … Read more...

True Engagement Starts with Speaking Digital Natives’ Language

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I attended a great conference in 2017 at the spiritual and literal home of England’s national rugby team, Twickenham. The event was the Verdantix EHS European Summit. I was lucky enough to be invited to participate on a panel that generated audience questions about the under-leveraging of Health, Safety and Environmental metrics and whether more data is desirable if organizations were already struggling to handle and gain meaningful insight from what they had. This was a solid topic and it played into one of the key conference themes of Big Data.

All was going to script, and then it happened… a senior director said the following, or something close to it:

“It’s all well and good this discussion of data, systems and associated metrics, but if we don’t find better and more innovative ways to engage our people in safety, nothing is going to change! Our performance depends upon it!”… Read more...

Your Data is Your Most Valuable Asset: Getting Started with Quality 4.0

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Data science and machine learning have surged in prominence over the past few years, and digital transformation seems to be on everyone’s agenda. Have you ever wondered why? Even though quality engineering has long been a data-driven pursuit, we now have the potential to get even deeper insights from our data because of several recent innovations:

  • Computing power per dollar has increased steadily (e.g. through adoption of GPUs).
  • Open-source software packages with powerful machine learning algorithms are freely available, reliable, robust, and well-maintained.
  • Infrastructure for data storage and management is readily available and cost-effective.
  • Cloud-based software, platforms, and infrastructure helps companies focus on their core competencies and scale rapidly when needed.
  • Algorithms are often more revealing when Big Data is available.

It’s easy and cheap to collect data but using it to generate actionable insights can be more challenging. Think, for example, about the digital displays available to a production … Read more...

Three Best Ways to Utilize Technology in EHS

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Big or small, there’s no doubt that technology affects and challenges the way your business operates more and more every day.  So what separates the strong from the weak?  Success from failure? Throwing it back to ancient Greece, philosopher Heraclitus said, “All is flux, nothing stays still – there is nothing permanent except change.” Evolve, adapt, progress, change!

Today, entire industries can disappear with a wave of new technology, and the most common error businesses can make is thinking they’re immune to that change.  In the EHS world, we’re just on the brink of our technology transformation, but make no mistake it’s coming fast and furious.  Below is the three best ways to utilize technology in EHS:

BIG DATA.
What is it?  Big Data in a nutshell, is when a data set is so large or complex that traditional data processing applications become inadequate, making it difficult to capture, analyze, … Read more...

Do You Know the 4 V’s of Big Data?

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Crystal ball of big dataFrom professional sports, to advertising, to investment banking and almost everything in between. Big data is driving thousands of decisions each day that impact us all in areas big and small. But what is big data exactly, and how or why should it impact efforts in the realm of health and safety?

First a definition of big data itself. Big data is a term that began to emerge over the last decade or so to describe large amounts of data. Boring I know. At its origin, it was a term used to describe data sets that were so large they were beyond the scope and capacity of traditional database and analysis technologies. As Moore’s law continued, technology caught up, but the data still kept (and still keeps) growing.

Beyond simply being a lot of information, big data is now more precisely defined by a set of characteristics. Those characteristics are … Read more...