Safety Information Management in Construction Firms: A Data Warehousing Approach

Safety statistics for construction indicate high fatality and injury rates. Construction firms in the USA must keep detailed records of all site incidents for OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration). It is found that many construction firms maintain these records just to satisfy the OSHA requirements and seldom use the data in the planning and decision-making of future projects. If the safety related data are integrated from different projects over a period of time, they can provide a good overview of the safety performance of general contractors and subcontractors involved in different trades and under different project conditions. A questionnaire survey by the author indicated that a majority of construction firms in USA use spreadsheets to record and report the site incidents. The data stored in these spreadsheets are non-integrated and often available in non-user friendly forms and formats and hence cannot be readily used by the decision-makers. In this research, a Safety Information Management System, named SafeMan, is developed using the data warehousing technique. Data warehousing is an improved approach for integrating data from multiple heterogeneous databases and other information sources. The SafeMan enables users to analyze safety data of past and existing projects to evaluate safety performance of contractors and subcontractors. The paper first discusses the importance of safety information management and basic concepts of data warehousing technique. Next, a step-by-step methodology is presented to illustrate the different stages of the SafeMan system development. At the end, discussion is made on a prototype system developed for reporting and analyzing safety information in a construction organization.