NTU Singapore digitalise incident reporting with Synergi Life

NTU Singapore was seeking a solution to digitalise the incident reporting process across their campus, and decided to move forward with Synergi Life.

In 2021, NTU Singapore was researching potential health and safety software vendors and learned of DNV’s Synergi Life risk management software. They were particularly interested in the incident management module, as NTU Singapore wanted to digitalise the process of incident reporting and investigation, while reducing the work involved in consolidating data for reporting to different stakeholders.

NTU Singapore invited DNV and other vendors to demo their softwares. NTU Singapore was happy to note that the software from DNV had the flexibility of customization to fit the organization needs. “Compared to other industries, we have very different system specifications,” says Mr. Saravanan Gunaratnam, Director, Office of Health and Safety. “The new solution should be able to serve the needs of our NTU Singapore community, while being able to integrate into our current system,” he says.

In universities, health and safety software solutions must take into account:

Organisational structure is more complex, due to a high number of research collaborations with external entities and students
The system must be able to link students to respective school/centre safety representatives.

40,000 users reporting on-the-go

“Previously, safety representatives had to fill in physical forms when incidents happened, which were then consolidated and manually entered into the system,” he says. Reporting an incident, including consolidating the data and the subsequent investigation work, could be a tedious process. With a total of 40,000 students, faculty and staff, the time spent on reporting, consolidating and investigating incidents was enormous.

With Synergi Life, users are able to report an incident on the mobile app easily. Cases are automatically logged into the system. The process is simplified and streamlined, with users being able to report issues on-the-go.

This also means that data is now collected in real-time, making reporting transparent and trackable for users and other stakeholders.

Information sharing, investigation and tracking made easy

“Safety representatives who need to have an overview of the cases can easily access the dashboard that reflects real-time data,” says Mr Seah. NTU Singapore provides a report of incidents logged, and it is now easier to get the data for reporting to management. Users can extract and export data in a clear and concise format with just a few clicks. Information sharing among the different stakeholders helps safety representatives to investigate the cases efficiently, while corrective actions can also be tracked in the system, so users are able to close the loop and share the learning points in their quarterly reports.

Timely local support

One of the main criteria for NTU Singapore when selecting the right incident-reporting solution was the level of local support. “We prefer to have local support and DNV was able to provide that, whereas other vendors in the market could not,” he says. “The support team responds promptly and resolves issues quickly, with feedback being followed up on in a timely manner.”

Overall, the introduction of Synergi Life at NTU Singapore has improved the campus’ incident management processes. The decision to implement Synergi Life as software-as-a-service (SaaS) was based on the need to make the system accessible via both the Internet and mobile devices, and to reduce the need for on-site data storage.

About NTU Singapore

NTU Singapore has over 33,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students in the Engineering, Business, Science, Medicine, Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences, and Graduate colleges. Ranked among the world’s top universities, NTU Singapore is also home to world-renowned autonomous institutes – the National Institute of Education, S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Earth Observatory of Singapore, and Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering – and various leading research centres such as the Nanyang Environment & Water Research Institute (NEWRI) and Energy Research Institute @ NTU (ERI@N).