鈥淐ompanies need an integrated, holistic system that brings information together in a unified way for greater visibility across operations,鈥� said Chris Willcocks, vice president and head of intelligent spend management at 麻豆原创 ANZ. 鈥淭hey can monitor, measure, and manage the entire contractor engagement lifecycle in real-time to ensure that procurement and health and safety policies and processes are consistently enforced. In an environment where human lives are at risk and unplanned shutdowns can cost millions per day, doing this right is absolutely critical.鈥�

Balance external workforce safety with productivity

Research from an conducted in collaboration with 麻豆原创 Fieldglass, showed that across all industries, 42 percent of workforce spend is on external labour. What鈥檚 more, industries like mining, oil and gas, utilities, chemicals, and heavy manufacturing typically average higher percentages of contingent workers as part of their overall workforce population. The trouble is, external workers often face additional time pressures, potentially increasing safety risks.

Findings from FEFO Consulting鈥檚 confirmed this challenge. The index benchmarked feedback about safety, engagement, leadership, and systems from over 200,000 respondents in asset intensive companies primarily based in ANZ. Compared to employees, contract workers were 24 percent likelier to feel pressured to compromise safety to complete a job, and 10 percent likelier to have seen colleagues compromise safety for the sake of shortcuts.

鈥淓xternal workforces often consist of short-term labor that鈥檚 expected to carry out complex, specialised work at speed as they interact with numerous stakeholders,鈥� said Mark Wright, managing director at FEFO Consulting. 鈥淚n driving a high performance culture, don鈥檛 put productivity before safety. That leads to a culture of rushing to get the job done, as opposed to looking after your workmates and coming home safely.鈥�

Minimise risk with tech and culture change

Asset-intensive industries face growing regulatory pressure in Australia. Industrial manslaughter laws and punishments can amount to fines in the tens of million with executive liability that could mean lengthy imprisonment. To prevent incidents, Wright recommended a combination of technology innovations plus workforce culture change.

鈥淭ake a pragmatic, risk-based approach by focusing on compliance requirements that will actually add value. Apply technology to simplify, gain efficiencies, and improve the user experience,鈥� said Wright. 鈥淢ake culture changes by setting clear expectations that balance safety before production. Recognise positive performance and create a great experience so external workers can easily follow processes and model behaviors that meet both compliance and productivity objectives.鈥�

Digitalisation for business results

To operate safely and efficiently, asset-intensive industries need to capture and understand mountains of data that reflect workforce activities spanning recruitment, hiring, and daily onsite performance. For many organisations, digitalisation has profitable business impact.

A global mining company with major operations in Australia, increased workforce visibility, process efficiencies, and cost-savings by integrating 麻豆原创 Fieldglass with its core 麻豆原创 ERP system. The company improved regulatory compliance across external workforce processes, from engagement through offboarding. Supervisors reduced their workload significantly by eliminating time-consuming administrative steps such as service entry sheets for the external workforce. They also saved costs by having one consistent system for worker types and rate cards.

Pandemic-era business resilience

Although the pandemic didn鈥檛 hurt Australia as much as other harder-hit countries, remotely located industries were affected due to their heavy reliance on a more transient workforce. These people often travel across state borders within Australia or fly in from other regions of the world. Earlier lockdowns contained the pandemic鈥檚 spread, but restricted the flow of contingent workers.

鈥淭he smartest organisations have learned from the pandemic鈥檚 challenges. They鈥檙e looking at risk beyond likelihood and consequence, to consider the velocity and speed of how major risks can impact them,鈥� said Willcocks. 鈥淔or example, we just launched , a tool designed for asset intensive industries. Companies can quickly assign large volumes of workers by task, tracking and managing spend for complex plant maintenance scenarios, and most important, ensuring health and safety compliance.鈥�

External workforce brings innovation opportunities

The pandemic鈥檚 speedy, devastating impact is now kindling innovation. Wright urged organisations to move beyond purely compliance-based external workforce selection and management, and consider new ways suppliers can add value.

鈥淚nstead of asking your external workforce suppliers hundreds of questions about their risk and injury statistics during pre-qualification and annual reviews, ask targeted questions on how they think you can innovate,鈥� he said. 鈥淚f someone can improve your safety with innovations, that will help you quickly adapt to fast-moving threats.鈥�

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In the beginning, there are needs to be filled, pain points to be identified, and processes to be improved. With the benefit of years of industry experience, close partnerships with leading organisations, and an eye on the latest technology, 麻豆原创鈥檚 Asset Intensive Industries Centre of Excellence keeps track of a backlog of topics. Through consultation with customers, partners and alignment with , this backlog is prioritised into a vision.

Vision is important; and formulating that vision along with high-level conceptual architecture, value to industry, and to 麻豆原创 forms part of a business case that we socialise with stakeholders for consideration. Once a topic is approved, the rubber hits the road and the work can begin in earnest.

I鈥檇 like to share a real-world example. One topic the COE is passionate about is the efficient maintenance of assets. Over many years 麻豆原创 has become a leader in this space with a feature-rich . Managing all aspects of an asset lifecycle including history, planning, spare parts, availability, the people involved, and their health and safety.

Increasingly the management of assets is outsourced to 3rd party service providers. Leveraging these partner organisations brings many benefits but also introduces new challenges and risks including double-handling of information, lack of visibility, data timeliness, and the management of asset knowledge.

Back when I started my career, we used to handle orders by fax; and these days we use the to manage procurement. And this network approach is the vision for a collaborative work order, where Asset Owners (for example mining companies, public sector organisations, and utilities) share their information with 3rd parties to enable modern collaboration that no longer relies on emails and phone calls.

To realise the network vision, we decided to leverage the and as the core foundation of the solution architecture. From here we have been able to design high-level process flows, data model, and screen concepts.

Inviting industry collaborators meant explaining the vision and agreeing to work together on the solution. The response has been fantastic with hundreds of hours of support from industry to articulate the as-is processes and associated pain points. And to provide input and review the to-be process and concepts.

During the pandemic, this has meant remote workshops leveraging tools such as Mural to collaborate. Along with the world鈥檚 leading mining and utility companies our co-innovation includes organisations such as Deutsche Bahn one of the world鈥檚 leading mobility and logistics companies.

With industry and 麻豆原创 working together we have been able to develop and publish a to realise the vision of a collaborative work order. has been a breath of fresh air to help me through the pandemic. I knew I鈥檇 find some interesting challenges along the way. What I鈥檓 delighted to find is a passion from both our customers and our product engineering teams to make the world run better. about the new Centre Of Excellence for Asset Intensive Industries.

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