Innovation in On-Site Job Safety Analysis

In construction, manufacturing, or any industry where there is a relatively high probability of physical harm, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires that organizations complete a Job Safety Analysis (JSA). Traditionally, companies will create JSA templates in a Word document, walk through it with employees on the job site, discuss mitigation steps for hazardous tasks, have everyone sign off on it, and send it back to the office.

JSAs are incredibly valuable to the safety of high-risk workers, but they do have a problem: they’re not particularly engaging or interactive. Because workers do risky, complex, and sometimes repetitive jobs every single day of their lives, they become numb to the hazards—and that’s when people get hurt.

The team at Novo Holdings has created a product that digitizes JSAs: JSA Cloud. With this app, companies can create a database of key steps, tasks, hazards, consequences, and mitigation steps, which are then available to workers in the field to assemble an appropriate JSA. Users can also create templates for common projects – excavation or roadwork, for example—allowing employees to create JSAs without having to think through all the different hazards and consequences individually.

When workers sign off on the JSA, it is recorded electronically and synchronized back to a centralized database so it happens in real time. From a safety standpoint, this ensures much better coverage: companies can monitor that their employees are signing off on the JSAs without waiting for the paperwork to return from the field, and new JSAs can be created on the fly in the field if something needs to change and sync back to home base. And because workers are often in areas with little or no connectivity, the app is configured so that it can operate offline and sync with the serverless backend once a connection is reestablished.

JSA Cloud also has additional features around incidents. If an incident occurs after a JSA is completed, it can be reported so that it is tied to the JSA. Then, OSHA can see the JSA and the incident tied to it, so that OSHA knows what instructions workers were given that day. This makes it easy to see where something went wrong, and the app is revolutionary in the sense it ties the two things together.

Novo Holdings has even bigger plans for the app, however. They plan to analyze the data their customers are providing and build out a predictive analytics engine to further advance on-site safety. For every JSA that is tied to an incident, Novo Holdings has data points that can provide context around what went wrong and why. They can then understand that in scenarios where, for example, it’s 34 degrees, drizzling, and workers are on a scaffold, there is a high probability of an incident, and advise stricter safety standards on the job site.

Digital innovation is happening in every industry—even staid ones like job safety. Serverless cloud backend services are really changing the game across sectors. Congratulations to Novo Holdings for taking a leadership role in driving positive change! Learn more about the Progress Kinvey serverless backend today!