Summary
Safety Trends and Analytics helps you look across all of your investigations at once instead of one at a time. It surfaces the patterns that matter most for prevention, including top contributing factors, incident recurrence rates, location hotspots, and how investigation work is distributed across your investigators.
Introduction
Individual incident investigations tell you what happened in a single event, but they cannot on their own reveal whether the same problems keep coming back or whether one site is generating far more incidents than others. Safety Trends and Analytics aggregates data from across your investigations so you can see these cross-cutting patterns and act on them.
This feature is typically used by safety managers and program owners who are responsible for reducing incidents over time. It answers questions such as "What keeps causing our incidents?", "Are we solving problems or just repeating them?", and "Is the investigation workload balanced across the team?"
Key Concepts
- Top Contributing Factors: A ranked view of the contributing-factor categories that appear most often across investigations, so you can focus prevention effort where it will matter most.
- Recurrence Rate: A measure of how often incidents repeat, based on incidents that share the same type and location occurring more than once. It is available as an overall rate and broken down by incident type.
- Location Hotspots: The locations with the highest incident counts, along with how many investigations are tied to each hotspot location, so you can identify the sites that need the most attention.
- Investigator Workload: A breakdown of active and completed investigations for each lead investigator, along with their average investigation completion time, so you can see how work is distributed across the team.
- Average Investigation Duration: The average number of days it takes to complete an investigation, giving you a sense of how quickly issues are being resolved.
- Corrective Action Effectiveness: A measure of how well corrective actions are working, based on actions that have been verified and marked as effective.
- Period Comparison: A comparison of key safety metrics between two time periods, so you can tell whether your program is improving or regressing over time.
Steps to Follow
Review your top contributing factors
Start by examining the Top Contributing Factors view, which ranks the contributing-factor categories that show up most frequently across your investigations. Each category is ranked by the number of investigations associated with it, so the categories at the top represent the recurring root causes worth prioritizing for prevention.
Check the recurrence rate
Look at the Recurrence Rate to understand how often incidents are repeating. The overall rate reflects incidents that share the same type and location and occur more than once. Use the breakdown by incident type to see which kinds of incidents are recurring the most, which is a strong signal that current controls or corrective actions are not fully resolving the underlying problem.
Identify location hotspots
Use the Location Hotspots view to find the locations with the highest incident counts. Alongside each hotspot you can see how many investigations are associated with that location. Focus your attention on the top-ranked locations, since concentrating incidents in a small number of sites usually points to a site-specific hazard, process, or condition you can address directly.
Assess investigator workload
Open the Investigator Workload view to see, for each lead investigator, how many investigations are currently active, how many are completed, and their average completion time in days. Use this to spot imbalances, redistribute work where one investigator is overloaded, and understand where longer completion times may be affecting your response.
Track effectiveness and average duration
Review Average Investigation Duration to see how many days investigations typically take to close, and review Corrective Action Effectiveness to see how many corrective actions have been verified and marked as effective. Together these tell you not only how fast you are resolving incidents but whether the actions you take are actually working.
Compare two time periods
Use the Period Comparison capability to compare key safety metrics between two different time ranges. This comparison covers metrics such as incidents, investigations, TRIR, average close days, and action completion rate. Comparing periods lets you confirm whether recent changes to your safety program are producing measurable improvement.
Conclusion
Safety Trends and Analytics turns the data captured in individual investigations into a program-level picture of where risk concentrates, whether it is recurring, and how effectively your team is responding. By regularly reviewing contributing factors, recurrence, hotspots, workload, and period comparisons, you can direct prevention effort where it will have the greatest impact and demonstrate whether your safety program is improving over time.