Conoco Phillips - Sight on Safety CP SOS!

Developing an Andriod Map app specific to Conoco Phillips locations. The app will use geolocation, crowdsourcing, and real-time reporting to help with safety issues at each location.

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Inspiration

When thinking about safety in the workplace, your current location is important. Location can cause variables to change such as hearing protection, hardhat, or safety glasses requirements. Also, safety risks occur in certain locations and need to be reported. Sometimes these reports can be an immediate concern and need to be reported quickly with accurate information and locations.

Thinking about one of the best crowdsourcing apps to date is Waze. Waze is a map application that uses crowdsourcing to alert users of traffic jams, speed traps, obstructions/obstacles on the road or shoulder etc.

The idea behind our app was to empower employees to report safety issues and concerns through the power of crowdsourcing. Most company-inspired safety plans really stress employee empowerment in reporting and prevention. This app will take that idea and thrust it into the mobile environment.

What it does

We named our mobile app, ConocoPhillips Safety on Sight, or CP SOS! for short. This app will function on any Android device, use geo-location against the layouts of various Conoco Philip’s locations, and will perform functions like:

Allow real-time reporting of safety issues/alerts: Users can instantly click a button on the app in order to report a safety issue or alert. If the situation needs immediate attention, there is an emergency button that will contact the Conoco Phillip’s Safety Department immediately. The app will update in real-time with an icon at the location on the map. When the user interacts with the icon, it will show the details of a safety issue.

If the issue is an emergency and is confirmed by the Safety Department. Any user in or approaching a certain distance from that safety event will receive an audible and haptic alert.

Send outgoing alerts by the ConocoPhillips Safety Department The Safety Department will have the functionality to send alerts through the app to employees. This could be used to alert of safety incidents, special events, or reminders to employees. We feel this feature is a good way for the Safety Dept of CP to stay in touch with it’s employees, which is a hard thing to do considering the size and scope of the overall company.

Incentive system that rewards app usage/reporting Adoption is always a difficult obstacle to launching a new app. We wanted to create this app for Conoco Phillips, and to be used by its employees. However, we do not want to force it on them. A good app is one where employees see it is beneficial to them to use it on a regular basis. While increasing safety awareness should be a good incentive, we felt we could add a point/tier system.
Basically, the more you use the app, you slowly accrue points. Valid reporting also adds additional points to your user profile. On a tier system, you could allow more customization to your personal pin as you move up the tier through point acquisition.

Also, the safety department could award prizes to top point earners or top point earners within a certain time frame. Overall, the system is a win-win for both employees, the Safety Dept, and Conoco Phillips by increased participation in this app.

Designate safety areas that will alert based on employee location Working in an energy exploration company comes with an increased risk of injury due to the environments in which employees work. Many places require various levels of safety gear to be worked in or simply passed through.

Often employees pass through areas that require safety equipment without even realizing it. The app will remind users that they need to be ready to don gear and will prevent safety issues from occurring due to the lack of gear being worn.

Prompt for user response to equip the proper safety equipment in designated safety areas This app will alert the user of the site safety requirements as it is being approached through an audible and haptic alert. The app will then ask them to confirm they are wearing said safety equipment once they have entered that area.

All this data will be recorded and stored in the back end in case it is needed for incident reporting/audits to OSHA or other agencies. This will also be another check for employees to be equipping the right gear for the right areas. Another win-win scenario.

Integrated Safety Checklists Safety audits and checklists are your most basic and effective form of safety prevention. This app will integrate checklists performed by the Safety Department and be stored on the backend. These checklists can be referenced for audits and research.

With this functionality, the app can alert when a safety inspection is past due. If a standard has failed the inspection, it will also alert all employees of the safety issue, and be marked for correction to the Conoco Phillips Safety Dept.

How we built it

Phase I Brainstorming Each team member contributed ideas for an app, features for said app, and how it would function. We accepted all ideas, no matter how wild they were, but keeping in mind that we needed to keep it simple for time constraints.

Phase II Submission of concept art for UI Each team member produced a concept of how they think should look and act. This would give the team choices on deciding which design to go with. We felt we needed a basic concept of the interface in order to design the I/O and for the actual front-end programming.

Phase III Design of the I/O conceptually Once the layout was chosen, we designed an I/O workflow of the app in order to know how each user assigned input will function, and what output the user would receive in turn. We did this by using a job flow design.

Phase IV Programming the front end for the app Based off our concept art for the UI, and our job flow design of the I/O for the app, the team set off to program the front end of the application.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge for our group, is we have little to no experience in mobile app development. We are all new to the Code Red: Artemis project, and while we all have some experience to one degree or another in coding with C+ and Python. None of us have much experience programming in Java or React.

On top of this, we had a project manager who had real-life experience in project management in various Information Systems projects but with zero experience in web dev project management.

This event was definitely a bootstrap moment for the team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Participation in our first hackathon

Meeting new people and friends

Networking contacts

Learning how to work as a team

Learning new program languages

Knowing you can scratch together an idea from nothing and develop a front end in a matter of 24 hours.

Anything is possible

Satisfaction of fully participating in Code Red!

What we learned

The mindset of the US Marines when it comes to obstacles is to “Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome”. This team did just that.

The team pitched in on the brainstorming sessions and came up with a lot of good ideas. We had excellent concept art for UI presentations, as well as a team member stepping up with the I/O job flow design for our app.

Lastly, we had the team not let the fact that we had zero experience in web dev stand in our way. Each team member took it upon themselves to crash course React and Java. Our goal was to participate and produce something for the Code Red: Artemis event, and we accomplished that goal. We learned that through teamwork, dedication, and hard work, we could overcome our limitations.

What's next for Conoco Phillips - Sight on Safety CP SOS!

This application has a lot of potential to be used by other departments outside of just Safety. In terms of Computer Information Systems (CIS) management, this app could be used to identify network port locations, electrical outlets, wireless access point locations, main/intermediate distribution frame locations (IDF/MDF). It could give users a physical asset inventory list of what is in that IDF/MDF.

Also, with the data aggregation from users submitting safety issues/concerns, a predictive model could be made eventually to proactively identify problems areas in certain facilities. This would allow the Safety Department to move ahead of problems before they in fact become a problem.

Lastly, we would also like to look at integration with OSHA compliance and inspections to help minimize any safety compliance issues within Conoco Phillips.

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