Arrowsight, a safety technology company specializing in video-based behavioral review/modification and coaching 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 rolled the video technology out on all projects.
Arrowsight uses fixed-point cameras and human-led video review—usually in the three-minute jobsite safety meeting the next morning—to flag both risky and exemplary safety behavior each day on contractor client’s sites. Unlike other safety technologies designed to catch only violations, the focus behind Arrowsight’s technology is enabling timely coaching and adjustments by reviewing video overnight with engineers at Arrowsight’s processing center overseas who then send a report with video from the previous day back via Microsoft PowerBi.
The Arrowsight system uses moveable, battery-powered and cell-enabled cameras that can operate without electricity or internet on remote sites. Good behaviors are just as likely to become a short video the next morning as violations.
Video courtesy of Arrowsight
Manufacturing to Construction
“As with any of the industries we work in, it’s great to be able to identify things that are unsafe and to provide data to 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, the founder and CEO of Arrowsight who first rolled the video review technology out 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 coaching.”
The cameras are placed to capture most of the activities going on at any site they’re installed and Arrowsight’s engineers in India review all of the video. Microsoft Power BI visualization provides a dashboard with analytics of everything that happened and short videos of both good and bad.
A worker walking under a crane pick to remove dunnage is the type of situation regularly found during the video where a discussion can be had in the safety meeting. Positive actions such as tying in at height are highlighted as well.
Contractors using Arrowsight have reported increasing safety compliance from 97-100% with worker’s compensation claims decreasing by 72%, according to data from a multi-year pilot program in New York deploying Arrowsight cameras and coaching. The program involved 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 out of sports and game film analytics being so incredibly useful in football, especially, and just bringing it into 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 healthcare and now construction, it’s all the same sort of lineage. You identify what are the very worst things that could happen in any industry.”
De-Risking Construction With Video Review
Aronson says from a risk management perspective, the things Arrowsight has helped clients with include limiting and stopping food recalls in culinary production, stopping wrong-sided surgeries in healthcare and eliminating people getting hurt or killed on construction sites.
Arrowsight jobsite camera
“The theme is constant, which is: figure out very bite-sized ways of feeding information to your clients 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 getting Suffolk on board helped the technology “clear the chasm” into adoption by more contractors.
“We’ve watched safety technologies, video, image review for a very long time, and tried a lot of them,” says Jit-Kee Chin, chief technology officer at Suffolk, “What is really nice about Arrowsight is that the focus is on learning and the tutorials really help change behaviors. It’s a rather unique angle amongst a lot of safety technologies.”
Aronson says that the behavioral process requires work on behalf of the contractor clients, but also from Arrowsight to really take hold.
“‘[Contractors] are using our tech to do safe things, but actually, we look at the videos ourselves, very meticulously, not just a tier one review. We have two other people looking at it,” he said. “We make sure that our clients are looking at the video, so we can track whether they’re checking out the really key videos that we select.”
Aronson says partnering with insurers such as Zurich on the carrier side has caused contractors to take notice.
Zurich announced in November that it was requiring Arrowsight technology for all construction wrap-up projects it insures in New York. This can lead to “lower rates in their insurance packages,” he adds.
Observational vs. Reactive Safety
On March 5, Oracle introduced its Oracle Construction and Engineering Advisor for Safety, an AI-enabled predictive intelligence platform that contractors can use to forecast project safety incidents to try to proactively prevent accidents and support safer, more cost-effective jobsites. LIke Arrowsight, Oracle’s approach uses observational data to change behaviors on any site.
“You flip the script from an auditor approach to measurable field engagement,” says Josh Kanner, Oracle’s senior vice president of AI and analytics who developed the AI model behind the Advisor product at his startup Newmetrix. “Observation is any interaction between anyone from the team on the site about anything happening safety-related out there. It records measurable field engagement. Safety is actually measurable and you measure it based on how frequently people take risks and the observations and types of them go into a score that ends up being useful in predictions.”
Contractors such as Boldt and Suffolk used this data to make benchmarks of safety, and then a weekly safety risk forecast. Tracking incidents of various severities allowed them to assess safety culture on individual sites. Boldt had a 10% reduction in incident rate and a 75% reduction in worker’s compensation insurance rates. Suffolk saw a 57% reduction in total recordable incident rate since its observation program’s inception.
“Since that stat was benchmarked, our safety rates have improved even further,” says Suffolk’s Jit-Kee Chin. “If you look back at the last five years from fiscal 2020 to now, that recordable incident rate has fallen three fifths, it’s closer to 70% now.”
She said that utilization of observational safety technical depends on how contractors use it and if they’re able to manage the data that companies like Arrowsight and Oracle provide.
“It’s depth, it’s utilization,” she says. “Technology needs to sit within some overall management system for safety. It needs to plug into the workflow so when it plugs into the three-minute stand-up meeting at the start of the day, it impacts how you review incidents and how you assign additional oversight to jobs that are particularly risky. At a point in time it needs to be brought into a management system.”
She added that Suffolk’s overall safety management system includes its safety managers onsite and an oversight level among project executives that have helped it achieve that 70% reduction.
