NYHighways becomes first highways business to use Connected Safety Net’s reporting app

3 Mar 2022

NYHighways have adopted the Connected Safety Net incident reporting app into the operations of the business, becoming the first highways company to do so.

With a focus on safety innovations, the app was a perfect fit for NYHighways and allows employees to quickly and easily report incidents, with functionality to upload pictures, videos, CCTV and audio recordings, while reducing the need for typing out reports or paperwork.

The app even works offline, which is an invaluable feature for NYHighways’ staff who often work in remote, rural locations with low connectivity.

In addition, the app can use third party machine learning and the latest AI technology, which allows automated near miss reporting, ensuring a focus upon accident prevention. Another first for a local authority highways business.

“The Connected Safety Net app slots into our operations seamlessly, allowing us to send and receive reports of incidents quickly and efficiently,” says Ross Bullerwell, Managing Director of NYHighways.

“In turn, we can reduce these incidents in the long-run and ensure the safety of our employees when they are at work.”Connected Safety Net have enjoyed working with the NYHighways team and see themselves becoming an ‘an integrated part of NYHighways’ daily operations’.

Paul Richardson, Connected Safety Net’s Managing Director, said: “We pride ourselves as a transformational safety solution, which fits perfectly with the passion and focus NYHighways have for safety and continuous sustainable innovation. It’s amazing to be part of such a forward thinking organisation.”

Since launching on June 1st as a teckal company created by North Yorkshire County Council, NYHighways have made safety a priority. They are the first local authority highways fleet to use reflective logos on their vehicles, giving them extra visibility at night. This is in addition to a number of safety features on their vehicles that help increase the visibility of cyclists to their drivers.

“We are investing in safety and in providing the workforce with the right resources. Every aspect of the resources we’re providing has been thought about very carefully,” explains Ross. “Our internal motto is to ‘go home safe, go home healthy’ – we want our staff to return home to their families and loved ones at the end of a long working day.”

John ‘Jock’ McDade, Area Manager at NYHighways, was responsible for the initial testing of the app and said of his experience: “I enjoyed trialling the Connected Safety Net app and it’s definitely the way forward in my opinion. It’s extremely user friendly and when using the voice function, it has even dealt with my very strong Scottish accent fairly well on most occasions!”

Jock continued: “I look forward to using it and feel it will be a valuable tool for NYHighway’s employees who are on the road.”

Innovative in concept, design and performance

Live at scene incident, accident & near miss capture, on a mobile device, which can operate off-line if no connectivity is available.

Live at scene pictures & videos captured through the app and followed by imagery automatically being removed from the phone once uploaded to the cloud for GDPR compliance.

Innovative use of speech to text capabilities using the mobile devices microphone to overcome language and literacy barriers amongst end user population.

Guided workflow throughout the capture and investigation processes to ensure only the necessary information is captured, but that all information is collected in a standardised way across an organisation.

Automatic GPS location capture for incidents, accidents & near misses captured via the mobile app to improve accuracy of reporting and allow location-driven analysis of the data.

Automated email alerting throughout the process from live capture to investigation at the scene & follow up investigation at desk.

Collaborative plug and play for other innovations, e.g. automated near miss creation within CSN based on data coming from CCTV vision software or proximity sensor data.
 
Automated action follow-up through email alert notifications when actions are due and overdue.

Provides single digital storage location for all key information and documents relating to an incident, streamlining provision of this information to claims handlers in the event of a claim, which can lead to claims being handled more quickly and efficiently with the potential to reduce the cost of the claim.

Flexible audit form capability delivered as part of the same solution as the incident & near miss reporting for maximum synergy across both the safety reporting and preventative analysis arenas.

Open approach to integrating data with other systems, for example, interfacing CSN data to a clients’ BI tool to enable powerful reporting and analysis combining CSN data with other operational data gathered in other systems.