National Grid UK

National Grid UK is one of the world’s largest investor-owned energy companies. National Grid owns the natural gas and electricity transmission systems for the UK, as well as operating within North East US. They connect millions of people to the energy they use every day.

The problem

Adam, one of National Grid’s Project Engineers, found it difficult to collect unified safety and quality data. Data collection for National Grid, one of the largest energy companies globally, is crucial to gain perspective of how the company is performing. Quality control at this scale is difficult, particularly when locations are spread across the UK.

Having no unified system, Adam was using Microsoft Excel to perform site inspections and checks. This meant that he had to manually collate, analyse and act on the data. Now by using SafetyCulture (formerly iAuditor) – the critical data is in one place, so Adam can have the complete picture and evaluate the quality of contractors across multiple sites.

One platform for data

Adam and his team use SafetyCulture platform to collate all the information on site, and analyse the key problem areas. Looking at the data in a meaningful way to generate business decisions was Adam’s aim with the SafetyCulture software. With SafetyCulture’s open API – National Grid use a desktop exporting tool, in conjunction with PowerBI, to visualise and manipulate their data. This helps them to make more informed decisions. National Grid increased the range of inspections they were doing from 35 to 105. With the ease of SafetyCulture they were empowered to do more checks in less time. The PowerBI graphs and charts enable Adam to run reports and feed vital information back to the management team.

In addition, the integration allows National Grid to visualise their data which in turn helps with consistency and to drive proactive behaviour within both the internal teams and subcontractors.

Monthly, Adam looks at the number of inspections that have been completed on each site. For example: if there were 10 audits and each receive a 100% conformant score, is this because that site is performing well or are they not inspecting it properly? SafetyCulture allows National Grid to share best practices with the rest of the business.

By drilling into areas of non-conformance, they can determine whether an issue is high or low risk, and whether they need to go out to site and resolve it immediately. With PowerBI, they can break down the data by different criteria and see areas of poor performance, potentially risky areas, or areas of good performance which can then be dealt with accordingly.

In addition, the PowerBI integration has highlighted gaps in their process and solved the problem of having a disjointed view. SafetyCulture’s API helps National Grid with high-level visibility so they can identify systematic issues before it affects the entire business.