Boeing Enterprise Health & Safety
Making the factory a safer place to work.
Overview
One morning I was asked to step into a meeting where a report was up on the projector showing the last fifteen years of injuries and the costs associated to the company. It was staggering.
“We can’t see why people are getting injured. We don’t know why the incidents are repeating themselves. Can you tell us if you see a pattern from these reports?” I worked with these numbers for two days and could come up with nothing. The data was incomplete. So I asked them for data related to the people injured from HR. Who they were and when they were hired. When we connected the two data sources, I noticed a ray of light emerging from the otherwise gloomy gray skies of Seattle. It was profound
The data showed that factory workers had the highest injury rate in the first two years of being hired. There was no safety training on the factory floor. Designing safety posters and videos meant little to the factory workers when they were unaware of the operational details of how to work in a safe environment.
The Challenge
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Injury data existed in Excel spreadsheets and couldn’t be read easily
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Solutions were reactive rather than preventive
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The real reason for recurring injuries was difficult to learn
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Excel was difficult to visualize data easily. We needed a better tool to visualize over 80 years of data related to industrial accidents
The Solution
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We started off by creating an Ishikawa diagram showing the root cause analysis of accidents
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By leveraging Tableau’s leading analytics platform, it was easier for us to show production line supervisors injury metrics linked to various scenarios
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A visual dashboard allowed us to design data according to a narrative that could communicate the information better
My Role
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I was the data scientist for Boeing EHS and employed the following methods:
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Worked across five engineering teams to understand the complexity of the production line, and established faster analytical reporting while cultivating a healthier and more productive partnership between engineering and data design.
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Led all levels of data design review with engineering and Boeing EHS leadership.
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Designed and executed all user research activities including interviews, validation testing, longitudinal contextual walkthroughs.