Altice USA Adopts Mobile EHS Apps to Accelerate Performance Excellence

On a recent ProcessMAP EHS Leadership Roundtable, Joseph Dror, Manager, Health, Safety and Environment for Altice USA shared the story of his company’s adoption of ProcessMAP’s mobile EHS applications to enhance their safety culture and help reduce incidents. Altice USA is headquartered in New York, and is the fourth largest provider of cable in the United States. Altice USA was formed in 2016 with the merger of Sudden-link and Cablevision. The company employs more than 10,0000 employees in 21 states in over 300 locations. Altice provides customers high-speed broadband, ultra HD video, digital advertising solutions, local news, telephony, and wireless communications. 

As part of their commitment to the health and safety of their employees, Altice utilizes ProcessMAP EHSQ solutions, which have had a significant positive impact on the company’s safety program. 

In 2015, Altice was managing safety processes and procedures on paper, storing reports in binders, with no analytics and no accountability. Prior to web-based reporting, incidents were tracked by hand on a piece of paper. It was easy for documents to get lost, and record search and retrieval was slow and time consuming. There could easily be multiple versions of the same report being circulated, and tracking the number of incidents in a week, a month or even a year was sheer headache!

In 2016, Altice adopted the ProcessMAP EHS cloud solutions, which provided their safety team web-based analytics, increased accountability, and easier ways to search and retrieve information via the web. But while the web-based reporting was helpful, the company’s large mobile workforce, including field technicians, sales representatives, news reporters and others who were not sitting at a desk in front of a computer required a solution that could be omnipresent with them. Oftentimes people took notes on a piece of paper and then transferred it over to the web at a later time. In other instances, people tried to remember to complete reports when they got back to the office, or the next week or even the next month, entering details from memory. The safety team recognized that there were incidents that were lost or forgotten, and unable to be tracked. Such employees, out in the field, needed a truly mobile-friendly set of EHS apps.

Recognizing this fundamental need to make their EHS vision successful, Altice collaborated with ProcessMAP to adopt mobile EHS applications, which included:  

• Audit management 

• Incident management

• Activity / Task management

• Behavior-based Safety

• Risk Assessment

• Sustainability Performance Management 

Mobile Adoption

In preparing to launch the mobile apps, the safety team developed a rollout plan, they initiated testing via their health and safety ambassadors and they conducted online training for a few hundred users. The team learned from the test group what worked and what didn’t, made course corrections and then rolled out the program to their 10,000 employees. When the safety team launched ProcessMAP mobile apps, they saw rapid, organic adoption of the mobile platform compared with the web-based platform. From December 2018 to January 2019 Altice saw nearly a 600% increase in mobile app use. More than half of Altice’s incidents were near misses. From Heinrich’s triangle, the safety team understood that there are often many more near-misses than real incidents.  When Altice measured results after a full year of mobile app usage, approximately half of the logins were on the mobile apps versus web-based logins. Ninety percent of their incidents were near misses.  They saw 26,000 near misses created on mobile compared with 6,000+ near misses created via the web.  The mobile apps made it easier for Altice employees to use and track incidents.

Altice EHS performance

The Altice team experienced both leading indicators and lagging indicators since they launched ProcessMAP mobile apps.

Leading Indicators

• • 76% increase in the rate of near miss reports within 24 hours over a year 
  • 357% increase in the rate of incidents reported within eight hours over a year 

Lagging Indicators 

• • 18% reduction in work-related injuries / illnesses over a year
  • 21% reduction in lost time / day incident rate over a year
  • 30% reduction in workers compensation-related claim costs 

ProcessMAP was a pioneer in bringing the first truly 100% cloud/ SaaS EHS platform to the market back in 2000, long before “cloud” had become the industry buzzword. Keeping in line with the same spirit of staying ahead of the curve and bring cutting-edge solutions to the market, ProcessMAP was one of the earliest to bring natively mobile solutions to EHS leaders across the world. The mobile EHS apps were not shrunk-down versions of regular web pages. They took advantage of native iOS and Android capabilities, including TouchID and FaceID type authentication protocols. ProcessMAP’s mobile EHS apps allowed EHS stakeholders to carry the full power of a robust EHS platform in their pockets, without being tethered to a wall-socket. To learn how ProcessMAP can fundamentally and digitally transform your EHS initiatives, sign up for a free trial today!