“We are now able to obtain up-to-date and accurate information at the touch of a button.”
About Babcock
Babcock is an engineering and support services company who delivers critical asset support to many sectors, including transport, energy, defence, telecommunications and education.
- FTSE 250 company
- 17,000 employees
- Revenue 2008/09 £1.9 billion
- 6 key divisions; marine, defence, rail, nuclear, networks, engineering & plant
Project Summary
Babcock Networks wanted a better way of capturing information about accidents, environmental incidents, near-misses, damage to property, dangerous occurrences and occupational ill-health. Their main requirement was to speed up accident investigations and highlight problem areas so that corrective actions could be put in place quickly.
Babcock’s Networks division operates in the high voltage power transmission and distribution, digital television infrastructure, mobile, fixed telecommunications and next generation networks markets in the UK.
Babcock Networks is a provider of managed services to the communications, power transmission, utilities and property sectors. Working in close partnership with their customers, who include the UK’s major network owners and operators, Babcock Networks successfully deliver large scale network infrastructure projects in the UK and internationally.
Formed in 1930 as JL Eve, Babcock Networks has been involved in a number of significant and historic achievements which includes the building of Alexandra Palace in 1936, the world record-breaking 1000ft Bilsdale TV mast which has a 900ft lift and the construction of the ‘Super-Grid’ throughout the 1950s and 1960s. More recently they are involved in the Digital Switchover, the process of changing the entire UK television broadcast network to digital, and the upgrade of National Grid’s transmission network through an Alliance partnership with National Grid and two other major industry leaders, Mott Macdonald and Amec, which is also a Rivo client using the Safeguard application to manage accidents/incidents and auditing.
Business Needs
Due to the large range of activities undertaken by Babcock Networks across the Group, some of which are inherently dangerous, a good Health and Safety record is vital to the company’s reputation and ability to retain and win new contacts.
A large proportion of Babcock Networks’ employees work off-site on various transmission projects; these are run portacabins with 150 crews each consisting of two or three riggers. In this unique environment, Babcock Networks faced issues around reporting accidents and incidents and near-misses. The old reporting system was slow and cumbersome and did not encourage near-miss reporting.
Paper incident forms were completed and then sent to the Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) department. This information was then entered on to the database that only one person in the HSE department had access to. Analysing data was very difficult and time consuming and investigations of incidents were ad-hoc.
Babcock Networks needed to capture information about accidents, environmental incidents, near-misses, damage to property, dangerous occurrences and occupational ill-health. Their main requirement was to speed up accident investigations, highlight problem areas in order for preventative measures to be put in place immediately and to encourage near-miss reporting.
Solution
Rivo’s Safeguard was chosen because it is a user-friendly system that could provide a fast impact on Babcock Networks’ Health & Safety management in particular by giving an instant overview of the state of compliance across the business and allowing Babcock Networks to focus on problem areas.
Using Safeguard established a clear reporting chain: forms could be completed at source and the data could be instantly interrogated by line and project managers.
Return on Investment
Mike Armitage, HSE Officer for Babcock Networks, looks at the benefits that Babcock has experienced since implementing Safeguard: “We are committed to protecting the Health and Safety of all our employees and using Safeguard has meant that we can reduce risk to our employees by putting in place corrective measures quickly to prevent future incidents. We are now able to obtain up-to-date and accurate information at the touch of a button about accidents, incidents and near-misses across all our locations and trends can be looked at and hazards easily picked up. Near-miss reporting has increased as it is much easier to do and we are now able to relate tasks to the near-misses so we shouldn’t have the same near-miss again.”
This white paper details the measurable financial benefits delivered to Rivo’s clients through the implementation of Safeguard.
