Do you know your credit score?

Your credit score is a “snapshot” in time that summarizes your credit-related behaviors. As your activities—such as credit card usage, amount of debt, ability to pay bills—shift and change, so does the score.

Ultimately, your credit score tells you about your credit history. With that scorecard, businesses are able to make decisions about how they will lend you money.

That’s just one example of predictive analytics in-action. And although people may not be familiar with the term “predictive analytics,” it’s been around for years. Still, there are so many organizations that haven’t used these techniques to improve safety and to prevent accidents in the workplace.

…But What Exactly is ‘Predictive Analytics’?

Predictive analytics allow us to proactively collect and mine data for useful insights. This includes data mining, pattern and trend identification, statistical algorithms, machine learning, and more.

As a form of business intelligence, it’s typically used to take past data and to model or to predict what could, or what is likely to happen, in the future.

iReportSource is a complete Safety Management Software that can help you save time, reduce risk, and improve employee safety.

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Predictive Analytics for Better Decision-Making

Predictive analytics is a major breakthrough because it allows companies to know what could happen in the future and what they should do in the present to change that outcome. Just like with a credit score, we use data from the past to tell us what’s likely to happen (or not happen) in the future.

Applied to safety, that often means managers know more about what they can and should do to minimize/reduce hazards and risk. Put simply, predictive analytics helps to empower managers to make better decisions.

Predictive Analytics in Safety

Healthcare, government, retail, Internet, software, pharma, manufacturing, banking, cybersecurity, public transportation and many other industries are already identifying opportunities with advanced analytics. This helps to shape functions including sales, marketing, operations, and logistics.

If this is true, why don’t more companies improve their safety and prevention activities by leveraging their own data?

For many businesses, a few things can hold them back from properly being able to use predictive analytics. These barriers include:

•      Lack of a system-wide or scalable solution;
•      Lack of ability to compile the company’s data;
•      The belief that predictive analytics is only for big companies—or that it’s too expensive;
•      The perception (or reality) that there is a complete lack of data itself to be utilized in any way.

Solutions such as iReportSource remove those perceived barriers.

For example, iReportSource:

•      Provides an all-in-one platform to make data collection possible (and paperless!);
•      Can show the short- and long-term ROI of all safety activities—including preventative safety actions;
•      Provides a guided, simple process for collecting actionable data, empowering staff in the process.

Transportation, construction, retail, healthcare, and hospitality industries—and arguably any industry—all have that same opportunity to apply predictive analytics to their safety programs. Traditional use of data, such as lagging indicators, will not be enough in the future for these industries if they really want to better manage risk.

Looking Ahead: Making Data Work for Your Company

As we’ve described, advanced analytics provides a powerful way to summarize findings, forecast the future, and optimize decision-making to ultimately support a culture of safety.

Here are 8 key areas where we expect advanced analytics to drive safety ROI:

Prescriptive suggestions for behavior change. Companies and facilities will be able to use information to change behaviors, actions, and habits. These recommendations and real-time insights will continue to be broken down by variables such as employee role, department, and/or location.

Reduce operational efficiencies. Timely insights will shape nearly every function in the business, and as safety improves, operations can often improve alongside it.

Risk detection. Often times, the more data a company has, the better the insights will be. Time is on the side of businesses looking to find contextual and actionable insights to detect and minimize hazards in the workplace.

Optimization of safety investments. Models will help show the safety activities that are most meaningful to a worksite, facility, or organization as a whole. Analytics will also help connect the dots between safety, performance, and even productivity.

Smarter dashboards. Being able to analyze, explore, and compare data in new ways will allow for smarter dashboards and more data-driven decisions. Not only can this help support proactive safety activities, but it can transform what happens if an incident does occur.

Better communication and collaboration. Safety leaders will be able to spend more time communicating with their employees and less time on data entry because all activities can be automated and tracked with solutions such as iReportSource. In addition, any department will be able to tap into real-time metrics from safety right when they need to.

Higher quality data. Historically, the problem with spreadsheets has been the amount of time it requires to continually collect and then update the data. Not only will predictive analytics give leaders more time in their day, but it will remove much of the potential for error that can come with spreadsheet calculations.

Second, traditionally businesses have found that some of their data collection was inaccurate, inconsistent, or altogether false based on when or how it was collected. Solutions like iReportSource support and encourage standardized data collection that is both accurate and unbiased. In turn, this helps to deliver more accurate and contextual insights for the business.

Reduction of workers’ comp costs. Not to be forgotten, faster and more consistent data collection will help employers with workers’ comp claim reporting investigations. It will also reduce the impact of workers’ compensation costs—both indirect and direct costs.

Learn More about iReportSource’s Predictive Analytics

We know you’re busy, so let us do the heavy lifting. Our analytics dashboard will show you everything you need to be completely confident: from ROI, cost savings, the number of safety trainings completed and much more, all with the click of a button. Are you ready to take back the 4+ hours a week you spend preparing these reports?