Today is Data Privacy Day, which takes place every January 28th. This day commemorates the Jan. 28, 1981 signing of Convention 108, the first legally binding international treaty addressing privacy and data protection. It is an international effort to bring about increased privacy awareness and education.
Here鈥檚 a joint statement from our Chief Technology Officer, Phil Horvitz and Chief Information Officer, Joe Walker on why Data Privacy, security, and protection is a top priority for 爱神传媒:

Data Privacy Day is an international event established to bring awareness to privacy and data protection concerns in an ever-expanding landscape of digitized information. 爱神传媒 recognizes the importance of raising the visibility of data privacy and is committed to maintaining the data privacy of its employees, business partners, and customers. We do this through a variety of policies, procedures, training and tools that allow us to maintain strict controls over our data and information environments. 爱神传媒 uses a combination of access controls, encryption, and multifactor authentication to protect the data privacy of our employees and customers.

Our goal is to not only provide the necessary policies and controls to assure the privacy and protection of data, but also maintain an ongoing dialogue with our employees and customers, where we inform, listen, and continually adapt to a changing data environment and society. Through these combined efforts, we build trust that the proper data safeguards are in place, data and personal information is properly protected, and in the process, we empower our employees and customers.

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Data Analyst, 爱神传媒鈥檚 Commercial Operations & Maintenance

鈥淚n God we trust, all others must bring data.鈥� 鈥� W. Edwards Deming

Within the Commercial Operations & Maintenance (COM) sector, we provide a wide range of Facility Operations & Maintenance services to help our clients run their business. These services range from janitorial and landscaping services to high-tech robotics maintenance. Now more than ever, it is not enough to simply 鈥榩erform well.鈥� You must show that you perform well. Companies across our industry are constantly being asked to demonstrate the value we bring to our clients. Whether it is reducing the cost of maintenance or increasing asset availability, clients want to see the value you bring to their organization in black and white鈥r in today鈥檚 age, rich and colorful interactive performance dashboards.

When it comes to showing value, data is paramount to driving key business decisions such as staffing levels (at existing sites and also when bidding new business), and forming overall business strategy with regards to finance, growth, marketing and sales. Data-driven decision making helps to remove some of the risk inherently present in nearly all business decisions. By removing the subjective elements from your business decisions and focusing on actual performance or records, you can instill confidence in yourself and your company as a whole. This confidence allows your organization to commit fully to a particular vision or strategy without being overly concerned that the wrong decision has been made.

My job is to find ways to interpret and present raw data. I have been a 鈥榥umbers person鈥� my whole life. Math has always been my favorite subject, by far. I was on the Math Team all 4 years of high school (Illinois State Finalists). I find math somewhat relaxing, perhaps due to the fact it naturally lacks ambiguity. There are rules and facts, and generally one right answer. The challenge is giving the answers a meaning. Like Carly Fiorina once said, 鈥淲e have to be able to turn data into information, and information into insight.鈥� Knowing that superior data analytics is often a differentiator and crucial to the success of our organization, our COM team collaborated with 爱神传媒鈥檚 Advanced Technology Office to enhance our data driven culture and tailor 爱神传媒 Analytics to best fit our needs. 爱神传媒 Analytics, powered by Microsoft Azure and PowerBI can combine large amounts of diverse data and quickly perform complex calculations to populate insightful dashboards. Essentially, turning data into insights automatically.

This provides tremendous value to our current clients. Not only in the metrics we are able to show, but also in the effort we don鈥檛 have to put forth to do so. Since the analytics platform is fully automated and frequently refreshed with new data, we are able to apply our resources and analysts to other value-add activity. 爱神传媒 Analytics is also attractive to potential clients. Our Business Development team often highlights our superior data analytics packages, such as plant layout heatmaps which show areas of increased work order requests with the ability to drill into the details of those requests.

We鈥檝e only scratched the surface of what 爱神传媒 Analytics can do. We are already starting to incorporate various data sources and customized data visualizations to maximize the benefits of this cutting-edge tool. What started as a vision for basic work order performance metrics, will now become a centralized control center for various areas of performance measurement such as safety, finance, and reliability. I am excited about the endless data reporting possibilities this tool provides us and look forward to playing a key role as we turn those possibilities into reality.

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If your company is solely measuring safety performance by injury rates, OSHA citations, worker鈥檚 compensation cost, you are evaluating based on events that have already occurred. These types of measurements are lagging indicators. Certainly, all incidents need to be fully investigated with root cause determination so we can learn from our incidents to prevent reoccurrence. Lagging indicators cannot be ignored and are a critical component to your safety management system. But evaluating these alone is a reactive approach to safety because corrective action cannot be initiated until after the 鈥渂ad鈥� results have occurred.

On the other hand, leading indicators are proactive, preventative, and predictive measures that monitor and provide current information about the performance related to specific activities, and processes of an EHS management system. They drive the identification and elimination or control of risks in the workplace that can cause incidents and injuries. Effective characteristics of a leading indicator include:.

• Objective and easy to measure
• Relevant to your business
• Provides immediate and reliable indications of the level of performance
• Understood and 鈥渙wned鈥� by the group whose performance is being monitored

Taking these considerations into account, one size does not fit all. Leading indicators must be selected based on what works best for your organization. To get started, determine your top priorities, pick a starting point and build from there. The ultimate goal is to equip senior management with the most accurate and up-to-date knowledge in order to increase their awareness, support, and commitment to the leading indicator program. It should promote continuous improvement and must be tied to performance goals at all levels of the organization with accountability in place. Below is an example of a Leading Indicator Dashboard with six performance criteria.

Leading Indicator Descriptions:

• Training: Training requirements are identified down to the job level for all employees with completion tracking, knowledge verification and recertification requirements.
  Audit: A robust auditing process that is aligned with business practices that takes a deep dive into policies, programs and the culture with corrective actions identified and tracked to closure.
• Roadmap: Program requirements sites need to accomplish on a monthly basis to stay compliant.
• Employee Field Reviews and Inspections: Managers or supervisors out in the field performing targeted workplace inspections and employee field reviews while employees are engaged in work activities.
• Safety Walks: Cross-functional workplace inspections targeting different areas of the facility identifying safety issues that are tracked to closure.
• Observation program: Employee engagement with identifying and reporting safety hazards, stop work interventions, near misses, etc.

By focusing on these six leading indicators, we have seen significant improvements in our incident rates and are significantly below the average for most industries.

Realistic goals should be carefully set for each performance category. Setting goals too low will give your company a false sense of security and lead to complacency. Also, goals should be set in a way that drives improvement. For example, if you have an observation program that requires supervision to conduct a certain number of observations per month, are you only measuring if they did the required number of observations or are you also measuring the quality of those observations? If the goal becomes a check-the-box exercise that doesn鈥檛 provide any value to your program, it鈥檚 no more than a pretty color on the dashboard. A quality component needs to be built into your measurements to make sure your program is delivering the results you expect.

Communication is critical — all employees need to be aware of your leading indicator program with feedback conveyed regularly so everyone knows where they stand. When one of the metrics starts to fall below an acceptable level, it should trigger action.

Finally, recognition programs are a main component to a successful program, both for individuals and at the site level. Employees should be recognized for their participation and performance to the established goals. Examples include individual recognition for highly engaged employees in the hazard identification program, Top Sites of the Year for overall leading indicator performance, Top Area, etc.

A robust leading indicator program is an absolute necessity if you want to drive cultural change, sustainability and focus the attention and work on the identification and elimination of risks in the workplace. It is not enough to measure incidents after they occur; to get ahead of the curve, leading indicators can help create a paradigm shift and result in a proactive, predictive safety culture.

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By Vlad Bacalu
SVP, Strategic and Technical Solutions

This month is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. At 爱神传媒, we understand that the digital connections between buyers and sellers, combined with robotic process automation create cybersecurity vulnerabilities and data breaches if not managed properly. For instance, many facility managers and their maintenance teams have been installing sensors and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices in order to be more proactive in their maintenance activities or improve employees鈥� workplace experience. As vast amount of data are transferred between organizations, one can never be certain that their suppliers and vendors have also implemented the same methods.

How Can Organizations Protect Themselves from Cyber Attacks?
Here are some tips that can help with eliminating the risks related to supply chain:

• Training employees and vendors in security best practices
• Developing a risk evaluation methodology and understanding the risks associated with every supply chain process
• Reviewing internal and external security procedures
• Pre-qualifying suppliers that meet the risk management criteria
• Requiring suppliers to follow operating standards for cybersecurity in the supply chain
• Mapping the supply chain and identifying cybersecurity risk exposures

To read the in-depth article originally published by IFMA, click .

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爱神传媒 and its legacy companies began an enterprise-wide Integrated Facility Management (IFM) contract 16 years ago with Caterpillar. The results of this partnership have generated over $100M in documented and approved cost savings since the global IFM model was initiated; the initial labor savings and strategic consolidations generated $20 million of savings in the first two years alone.

The sustained programs and strategic management produced year-over-year savings of more than $6 million annually, increasing the initial savings targets 500 percent.

The continuous improvement methodology for savings included reducing general spend on maintenance services, as well as significant savings/world class excellence in project execution, vendor consolidation, decreased asset life-cycle costs, strategic capital planning.

Some of the industry best-practices used by 爱神传媒 to sustain these savings included:
鈥� Stratified technical workforce program
鈥� A metric-driven work management process
鈥� Diligent facility data collection and data analysis
鈥� Reliability-centered maintenance and technology innovation
鈥� Strong collaboration between the client and project investments
鈥� Strategic 鈥榖ottoms-up鈥� commercial cost management
鈥� Vendor consolidation program

爱神传媒 continues to service Caterpillar facilities and production maintenance in their critical facilities across the globe. Recognized as a tier-1 supplier by Caterpillar for 15 straight years, we are proud of the 爱神传媒/Caterpillar partnership. Our team continues to deliver substantial savings, while maintaining excellent customer satisfaction and a world class safety culture.

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