Safety Leaders Define Key Metrics for the Future

Leading Thinkers Collaborate at the 2008 DBO2 User Summit

San Carlos, Calif. (Vocus) November 19, 2008 -- One hundred safety leaders from around North America gathered in San Francisco, CA last month to attend the third annual DBO2 (http://dbo2.com/) User Summit, and to define how industry will look at and measure safety in the future. While the group identified over one hundred potential future trends, three rose to the top as focus areas:

1) Tomorrow's safety metrics are likely to be seamlessly integrated with quality and productivity metrics, thereby presenting a more complete view of risk, production and performance.

2) Companies will rely less on lagging metrics like accidents or injuries and instead focus almost exclusively on upstream leading indicators to prevent incidents before they occur.

3) New metrics will emerge to more effectively measure systems, processes, attitudes, and culture. For example, current metrics such as perception surveys will become more dynamic, and will become integrated into daily activities.

The annual DBO2 User Summit brings together the community of DBO2 customers for three days of strategic planning, advanced training and skill development, and sharing of best practices. Safety leaders from Zurich, Turner Construction, Xcel Energy, Black & Veatch, Peabody Energy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and other forward-thinking companies participated in this year's event.

The summit also honored eight industry leaders, each of which had accumulated one million worksite indicators used to proactively reduce unsafe conditions and behaviors in the workplace. The majority of these customers reached this significant safety milestone in the past year, using DBO2 SafetyNet (http://dbo2.com/ProductsandServices/SafetyNet/). DBO2 SafetyNet helps companies to identify, monitor and measure the leading indicators in their safety systems in order to focus resources and reduce loss in the workplace.

"This group confirms that companies are determined to achieve and sustain zero injury performance," says Barry Nelson, CEO of DBO2. "They are proactively applying new ways to collect, distribute and analyze their key performance indicators."

The 2009 DBO2 User Summit will continue to expand upon and develop the discussion on key metrics for the changing landscape of safety, while recognizing the safety milestones of industry leaders committed to eliminating worksite risk. Next year's user summit will be held from September 28-30, 2009 in Pittsburgh, PA.

About Design Build Own Operate Inc. (DBO2):

DBO2, located in San Carlos, CA, was founded in October 2001 and has emerged as a leader in measuring human error and its consequence in the workplace. DBO2 is a wholly owned subsidiary of Industrial Scientific Corporation, sharing a joint vision of "preserving human life on, above and below the earth." With more than 50 million observations, DBO2 has amassed the largest repository of workplace behaviors and conditions in the world. DBO2's SafetyNet, QualityNet and ProductivityNet software services are currently used on a daily basis at more than 7,000 worksites for some of the world’s largest companies.

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