ارزیابی سیستم های اطلاعات مدیریت ایمنی برای پیمانکاران عمومی

The purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology that evaluates safety management information systems (SMIS) for general contractors mainly in terms of managerial effectiveness. Characteristics and variables of safety management assessments were investigated first, and several assessment techniques were then developed. A single index system measuring safety management performance of projects is also proposed for practical application. The assessments of safety management tasks are performed by several different variables including measures, project lifecycle, organization, etc. The assessment result from a case-company shows that a limited number of safety tasks can effectively represent the overall safety performance of a project. Among these tasks, managing the “daily safety meeting minutes” through the information systems was found to be the most important task. Details and implications of a case are outlined.

Safety is a critical measure for successful construction projects, and general contractors are vigorously utilizing safety management information systems (SMIS) to effectively improve their safety performance. However, there has been no systematic and quantitative effort to evaluate comprehensive appropriateness of SMIS for construction organizations. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology that evaluates SMIS for general contractors mainly in terms of managerial effectiveness. This paper consists of two phases where the first part is a development of the methodology and the second part is a test of this methodology by using a case-company. Characteristics and variables of safety management assessments were investigated first in this paper. The major variables for evaluating safety control tasks include the ‘importance within a safety management procedure’, ‘importance as a consequential impact’, ‘frequency of occurrence’, ‘user satisfaction’ and so forth. Several assessment techniques using a set of questionnaires and a series of workshops were developed. A single index system measuring safety management performance of construction projects was also proposed for practical application. By applying the proposed methodology to a case-company, the safety management tasks were classified and listed under a hierarchy, and each task was evaluated based on the pre-defined variables. ‘As-is’ as well as ‘to-be’ systems were separately analyzed so as to clearly identify the areas to be improved. Details and implications of the case are outlined. Practical issues and lessons learned are briefly discussed as well. For the purpose of clarifying the research objectives and identifying issues to be addressed in this study, research questions can be described as follows: (1) What are the most ‘important safety tasks’ those can enhance the overall safety performance of an organization with optimized managerial effort? (2) How can the head office safety experts or managers ‘monitor and support each project’, in terms of safety control, according to priority? Is there any indicator for this priority? (3) How can an organization develop ‘safety management information systems’ in order to meet these requirements?

An assessment methodology for safety management information systems (SMIS) proposed in this study has been proved to be effective enough to provide a construction organization with meaningful insights for identifying improvement areas with priority. The authors feel that the proposed methodology is also universally applicable to any organizations in the construction industry including owners, construction managers, engineers, or contractors regardless of their size or discipline. This universal application can be easily performed by simply adjusting the values for each measure in Table 2 in order to fit the characteristics of an organization. This study fully addressed the three research questions mentioned in introduction. “The most important safety tasks” can be assessed by using the four variables (roles and responsibility, specific characteristics, degree of importance, and utilization) and ten measure proposed in this study. The method to prioritize for the purpose of monitoring and supporting projects (the second research question) is using a single index that is composed of the most important safety tasks. The timeliness and completeness of each task are used as criteria for prioritizing the projects. Finally, for the third research question, the assessment methodology proposed in this study can provide with meaningful insights to improve the safety information systems for an organization as described above. Keeping records and regularly analyzing the performance indices for safety management can greatly contribute to reduce and prevent the accidents in construction. In order to make this process viable, key performance should be identified, and the entire monitoring process needs to be computerized. The methodology proposed in this study provides a tool to meet these requirements as well. It is also inferred that general contractors tend to expand their safety issues further into the design phase, and that roles and responsibilities would be widely shared by project participants including designer, contractor, and subcontractors. Therefore, integrating safety information systems among different project participants would be one of the challenging issues in SMIS. Finally, it is strongly recommended to analyze the overall requirements of safety management systems among the whole information systems in an organization as illustrated by Jung and Gibson (1999). This result from the ‘company-level perspective’ may affect the SMIS assessment process, even though the ‘safety’ is not less company-specific issue than the other construction business functions are.