Podcast: The future of workplace safety — Integrating advanced technology in EHS

Ryan Magee is the president and CEO of Cority, a provider of EHS and sustainability software. He joined the company in 2012 and has worked in various departments across the organization, supporting Cority as it continued to scale. Ryan has more than 10 years of experience in the software and technology industries, helping companies grow and stay competitive. Ryan recently spoke with Dave Blanchard, editor in chief of EHS Today, about the evolving role that technology is playing within the safety arena.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

EHST: What would you say are the biggest challenges, the biggest pain points, the biggest ‘I gotta figure out how to fix this sort of thing’ that EHS professionals are coming to you and your company for help with?

RM: To me, it sort of starts at the root. These departments have relatively finite resources to work with, and as such, they have to become very focused on ‘where do I deploy my effort and energy to drive the most value and the most change and do the most good.’ With that as the starting point, I think the challenge is often just a lack of visibility across operations and assessing risk. This is coming from a number of areas, whether they're dealing with homegrown legacy systems that are no longer keeping up or they've gone through disparate point solutions that are just not integrated, and they're not fit for purpose anymore as far as they haven't evolved either with the standards, the complexity of data, or just the organizations themselves. They get to a point where they're not being able to get that sort of holistic view of what's happening in operations, what's happening across the company. It's hard for them to focus their energy on where to pull the levers and where to deploy their energy to do the most good. And I think that's where they're trying to look, that's where I feel like they're looking and where Cority comes in, is trying to provide that single source of truth, so you have this more holistic view of incidents across all areas of the factory floor. Another part of that too would just be if you think about trying to standardize. As companies get more global, they want a more standardized approach to things, and it's very hard to do that when you have these regional-specific solutions. So again, we focused on something that can be deployed globally. We'll handle that scale so you can have all the data together and implement best practices across all geographies.

EHST: So, there are lots of different ways of looking at workplace safety and the progress that companies have made or are hoping to have made. By some benchmarks, statistically speaking, you could say things are so much better in the workplace right now. So many companies have gotten a whole lot better at workplace safety, and then you could also find statistics that tell you just the opposite. There are more injuries per year, there are more deaths, there are more accidents, there are more incidents.

How, from your perspective, from Cority’s perspective, do you see that there's been marked progress over the years in terms of customers or potential customers coming to you and saying, “Hey, we're getting a whole lot better at this. Do you have any solutions that can make us get even better at it?” Or are you hearing more on the other side of it? “We don't know what we're doing anymore because we just can't get a grasp on all the different regulations and issues that are occurring in the workplace.” I'm just wondering, from your perspective, do you think the workplace is getting safer or staying about the same? How do you look at it?

RM: There are two ways to think about it. By and large, I think EHS professionals are doing an amazing job. At least from the data that I've seen, overall, things have continued to get better. I think part of the challenge that they're facing today is that the actual landscape of the risks they're managing is just evolving at an incredible pace. Whether it's remote work or now you're dealing with these environmental changes, so extreme heat, extreme weather, every year there are new risks they're managing. Saying in front of that and on top of that, it's obviously daunting. For safety professionals specifically, if you look at overall broad incident rates, they're down at record lows across a lot of industries. We still have more work to do. We can continue to improve, and Cority is looking to support, rates of severe injuries and fatalities. Those rates have sort of plateaued, and I think part of what's happening there is that some of the KPIs and indicators that we're using to manage broad incidents and risk might not apply to the more serious ones. So, it's one of the reasons that we're so keen on providing a bigger holistic view, giving users more useful insights to manage, to understand, and delineate the different types of risk and manage both.

EHST: What you just said struck a chord with me. We've been hearing a lot from EHS Today's readers, as well as the listeners of this podcast, about predictive analytics and AI and better ways of measuring things like SIFs. Earlier this year, Cority made an investment in AI technology with your partnership with Inseer. What do you see as the advantage or the potential advantages that AI could bring to safety people? How familiar are EHS people with what AI is and what it can do?

RM: Second question first. AI is just such a broad term, and it's defined so many ways. I think there's a little bit of just sifting through the science fiction versus the reality and understanding what is cool and possible with what is practical and can actually add value and make people's work or lives better. Cority’s view and my view is that AI technology is a tremendous opportunity in EHS, and there are so many different ways that it can empower users, helping them focus the resources and the time they have to do the most good. I think there's a lot that AI can do, and it's an area that we've invested in will continue to invest in. When I think about AI broadly, we sort of break it down into four basic categories. For us, it's task assistance, insights and artifacts, expert support, and personalization and engagement.

So, task assistance is ways to drive efficiencies and streamline tasks, making things easier to fill out ,auto populating, automating repetitive pieces. That's the kind of manual labor that’s just time spent doing something that's not value add. AI frees them up to do more of the value add things that they're really there to do. Insights and artifacts are just ways of digesting big chunks of data and informing decisions or even creating data assets. So, if you think about changes in regulations and having AI comb through that and then just coming to “Hey, this has changed, this is what it means, this is what you need to do.” Boiling down things, making things quicker and more efficient for the end user.

Expert support is really just taking complex knowledge and having it baked into the AI. That's where the Inseer partnership is a good example. It's taking data capture technology and then building an expert ergonomist into the analytics so that you can film someone doing their work and it can come back and make a risk assessment and tell you where there's a chance of injury or a need for a corrective action. This is great for both fronts. If you're the expert ergonomist, it now lets you focus on just going out and working with the people that need help and focus on the real corrective actions and you're not just out and doing a bunch of assessments. And it puts some expertise into the generalists’ hands. So now your more generalist EHS professional can go out, and the safety professionals can assess. You know, assess them, shoot different things, and have that expertise in hand. And then again, they know when to go back and where to really focus their energy to drive the most good and prevent the most injuries. Then you get to the final piece, personalization and engagement. Again, that's just tools that make collaboration and work a more customized experience and just some more frictionless and seamless ways to partner between teams.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.