At the recent APTA TRANSform Conference and EXPO, I had the opportunity to be on a panel hosted by Modaxo SVP Paul Comfort with a couple of our RISC (Risk, Incident, & Safety Compliance) customers. We talked about the product and how it’s transformed not only their safety data, but their internal processes too.
If you’d like to hear the whole discussion moderated by Transit Unplugged host Paul Comfort, tune into the latest episode of Inside Trapeze.
Chris Tuff and Rahmin Azria of CENTRO in Upstate New York, shared their experience implementing RISC and, more importantly, why bringing RISC into their agency is essential to improving safety.
To set the stage for how CENTRO is implementing RISC, you first need to know how safety data was gathered, tabulated, and recorded at CENTRO.
A seventeen-page, paper report.
Before RISC, CENTRO gathered safety data using a seventeen-page, paper-based reporting form. For any supervisor to submit an incident, the typical process would be to take time (apart from the regular day-to-day operations) to complete a very detailed and lengthy form to then submitted to another person to enter all the collected form data into the system.
Over the course of time, these archived reports build up and are notoriously terrible to deal with if you need to go back and review/reference past incidents. Additional time is wasted pulling through boxes of reports to find something, much less trying to do an analysis on the information.
At CENTRO, a single person was responsible for entering the data from the 17-page form into a database. With the form collection process being manual, they had to decipher handwriting and go back for follow-up questions should there be any missing information/data required.
Additionally, this same person was also responsible for keeping the database running, fixing issues, and generating reports. Because this database sits outside CENTRO’s usual data infrastructure, there is no way to integrate safety and incident data with HR, maintenance, or dispatch data to understand the context and resolution of each incident.
CENTRO’s safety data was stuck in a silo preventing leadership from understanding trends, patterns, process gaps, or what the most pressing training issues might be.
RISC changed the entire way CENTRO worked with safety data. Now incidents are reported online regardless of location. If there is an incident in the field, an operator or supervisor can complete their report on the scene instead of waiting to get to the office. On-site and immediate incident reporting is integral in capturing all details in the moment without compromising data integrity, and can be augmented with photos or video of the scene.
Once the incident has been reported, the data is automatically gathered and analyzed. With 360-degree data transparency on the incident reported, set a clear path from incident to resolution to next steps. Follow-ups across departments (maintenance for repairs, HR for training, and many others) are automatically dispatched and managed within the system. Updates to the incident are stored in a central place, creating a single source of truth for each incident.
Because the data is automatically analyzed, key stakeholders can see where CENTRO stands at all times against their key KPIs and targets. Everyone can track essential KPIs for PTASP compliance on a single interactive dashboard. From this dashboard, CENTRO can view their long-term trends and assess where additional training is needed or where particular trouble spots are at the agency.
RISC can be used to track safety incidents across the agency, not just in the yard, garage, or in the field. Using RISC, CENTRO has a complete 360-degree safety picture from the back office to the yard to the streets.
For bus agencies that never had rail, who are now forced to track PTASP, set goals, look at the benchmarks and say, okay, “what are we seeing an increase in? What are we seeing a decrease in? How do we readjust some of our training to fix?” RISC is essential. We can see where we really need to focus on for training and scale back on other portions because we can see where incidents are occurring. – Chris Tuff
Something fundamental changed at CENTRO as we implemented RISC—it forced CENTRO to examine their own processes. When we work with agencies to implement RISC, it’s a two-way street. We need to understand their operations and their data before we can help them structure RISC to meet their unique safety needs.
But the process of asking questions, questions honed from talking with hundreds of agencies across North America, often brings surprising and positive outcomes. A simple question like: How do you handle this kind of incident or risk? Can lead to how DO we handle that? And that discussion leads to agencies streamlining and improving their processes.
RISC has really taken our chaos and turned it into something coherent. We have certain reporting requirements--whether it be federal or state--and those are usually triggered by answers to questions, like thresholds to what the accident damage was. We have to make sure that we're reporting accurately and what happens after we file those reports. How does it all flow through the organization? There's a lot of places where things are missed. It’s been a great exercise implementing RISC because now we really understand how things are being missed and putting all this together to try to fix our processes and have an established workflow is great. – Rahmin Azria
RISC can pull in data from across your agency so incident data can be combined with HR data to know when someone last had refresher training. It can pull in asset management data and connect preventative maintenance to safety outcomes. Even things like cleaning schedules and weather incidents can be combined with safety and incident data to fully understand what’s going on at your agency.
RISC is shining light on the way we've always done it, and forcing us to look at things differently to streamline processes and get the information to the people that need to make the decision or make the changes. If we can streamline this information and have a hands on dashboard to get that information real time, we can start the process to initiate changes instead of waiting down the road. We're really excited to see this come to fruition and actually start using RISC to set those KPIs and hopefully maybe it turns into an incentive program or somewhere with an incentive program for the employees to show that we're actually hitting these goals that we set. –Chris Tuff
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