Modernising health and safety assurance processes for the Defence Force

The New Zealand Defence Force is home to the Army, Navy, Air Force and civilian staff that safeguard the country’s sovereign territory, areas of responsibility and people. Its Defence Estate and Infrastructure (DEI) team manages nine camps and bases for the troops across New Zealand, ensuring that good infrastructure is in place for training and operations.

DEI’s health and safety team sought to transform its assurance procedures, which relied solely on spreadsheet-based solutions and MS Word templates. Information and analytics gathered from these forms is converted to reports and used to inform senior leadership and executive leadership papers. The cumbersome manual data capture method presented challenges in recording, consolidating and monitoring data on health and safety performance. In addition, a lack of data visibility could lead to a loss of valuable time and delays in decision-making and action.

GHD Digital, valued by DEI as a highly trusted digital partner, is part of an alliance that delivers services to DEI. As DEI’s partner of choice, our location intelligence team was engaged to digitalise the New Zealand Defence Force’s paper-based data capture process for health and safety assurance. 

Four question-centric forms were recreated and migrated to ArcGIS Survey123, an application available through the Esri GIS mapping software. These were templates for leadership site checks, Contractor Health Indicative Performance Scores (CHIPS), non-conformance and permit-to-work assurance. Leveraging Survey123, we built a fully integrated solution, enabling personnel in the field to complete the digital forms and submit information to the system in real time. 

Afterwards, the team set up another software, Safe’s Feature Manipulation Engine (FME), which extracts and converts datasets and loads them into a chosen destination. Through FME, automated workflows prompt the generation of a feature report and a link to a central hub directly sent to the user’s inbox. 

As users navigate the hub, they can review responses from the new health and safety assurance forms. These observations are presented via dashboards with graphics. Links to other hubs and instructional content, such as how-to guides, have also been embedded into this digital environment to facilitate seamless interaction with the dashboards. 

The tool became available within five months. Our team adopted an iterative, agile approach to discovery, design, building and testing with representatives from the camps and bases. This facilitated strong collaboration and enabled our location intelligence specialists to modify the tool at any phase in the project based on the client’s feedback.

The health and safety assurance tool empowered the New Zealand Defence Force to modernise and streamline processes and bolster recording capabilities and data visibility. Now accessible as a mobile application, the technology enables users to complete forms and share information anywhere, on demand. This provides the senior leadership team with relevant data analytics at their fingertips that drive decision-making confidence and reporting to executive leadership. 

Overall, the user-friendly interface — combining intuitive data gathering features, automated report generation and dynamic visualisation — equips users to quickly gain a real-time snapshot and understand the status of health and safety assurance across the organisation. It leads to better monitoring, and preventive and corrective actions to boost health and safety performance. 

This cloud-based solution reduces the need for manual intervention, saving the organisation valuable time. Collected data also remains secure within the New Zealand Defence Force’s system. 

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