Iluka Resources cuts injuries with business intelligence

Mineral sands miner Iluka Resources has significantly reduced the number of injuries on its job sites, and the number of lost working days, with the aid of a business intelligence dashboard.

Iluka trucking materials to port. (Courtesy: Iluka Resources)

The dashboard enables anyone with a network log-in to access the site and see statistics about injuries, including the nature of the injury and the location where it occurred.

“Our CEO put in place a program called Safe Production Leadership, and the BI dashboard was a key part of that," principal business analytics and intelligence analyst John Marelich told the Gartner Business Intelligence and Analytics Summit in Sydney.

Environmental compliance also falls into the health and safety division of Iluka’s business, and so environmental benchmarks and issues are also included in the dashboards.

“It was a design requirement that the dashboard would need zero training to use,” noted Marelich. “We hit that target.”

To create the dashboard the company called in an external consultant, and pulled in data from a number of databases that log injuries and injury locations.

“We aligned the information in the dashboard through the organisation chart,” he said. “It was important to get management buy-in as well as the buy-in of the employees.”

The health and safety dashboard has 700 users out of a total of 1200 Iluka employees. It averages about 40 hits a day, and was created using a business intelligence team of one person. “We’ve got another person now,” quipped Marelich.

The company is now focused on creating a number of dashboards for the executive team. First is a finance dashboard, then sales and marketing. Finally, there will be a geology dashboard.

“We want dashboards for all the KPIs at Iluka,” he said.