Empowering Occupational Safety with Business Intelligence

: Erfolgsfaktoren und Herausforderungen bei der Entwicklung eines BI-Dashboards zur Arbeitssicherheit

Abstract

Occupational safety is one of the relevant fields of action for many industrial companies, not only due to legal requirements, but also to ensure sustainable employee satisfaction and process stability. Business intelligence (BI) can contribute to the management of safetyrelevant processes by analyzing and visualizing relevant key figures. Nevertheless, the implementation of BI dashboards for the visualization of occupational safety KPIs has so far remained under-explored. This paper addresses this research gap by using the example of AMAG Austria Metall AG to investigate how three factors – data quality and integration, perception-optimized visualization and user integration – influence the development and implementation of a BI solution for occupational safety. The aim is to analyze their mode of action and based on this to derive recommendations for future BI projects. To this, central concepts such as business intelligence and performance dashboards will be established, followed by the development of a theory-based concept for anticipating the effects of the factors to be analyzed. This is followed by a single-case study. Project documents, three semi-structured interviews with internal and external stakeholders and the developed dashboard as an artefact were triangulated for data collection. The analysis was carried out using pattern matching, whereby the theoretically anticipated effects were compared with the empirical findings and completed with context-specific findings. The results of the study indicate that the three factors analyzed have a positive effect on the development and implementation of a BI dashboard for occupational safety. In the context analyzed, they promote especially user confidence in the solution and easier interpretability, two aspects that are particularly relevant in occupational safety due to a heterogeneous target group. In addition, the factors reinforce each other. High-quality data forms the basis for meaningful visualizations, a comprehensible presentation facilitates the interpretation of safety-relevant information, and the early involvement of users ensures a design in accordance with the users’ needs as well as their expectations. This interaction promotes acceptance of the dashboard and ultimately contributes to the effective control of safety-critical processes. Based on the results of the work in the field of occupational safety, early and continuous involvement of future users and the use of established forms of visualization as well as common diagram types are particularly recommended to achieve the aforementioned effects.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	German (Austria)
Supervisor	Christina Feilmayr (Supervisor)