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What counts as a vehicle-on-plant incident The term "plant" in a workplace safety context refers to machinery, equipment, appliances, vehicles, and tools used in the operation, including items as diverse as forklifts, conveyors, cranes, loaders, and powered trolleys. A vehicle-on-plant incident is any event where mobile plant interacts unsafely with a person, another piece of plant, or fixed infrastructure. The most common types include a forklift or mobile vehicle striking

What makes retail back-of-house different Retail warehousing shares many hazards with general warehousing, but it has characteristics that amplify the risk in ways that don't always get the attention they deserve. High throughput and time pressure Retail DCs exist to move product fast. Whether it's replenishing store shelves, fulfilling online orders, or processing returns, the operation runs to tight schedules. Peak trading periods like Black Friday, Christmas, and end-of-fi

Let's talk about money. Not because safety is fundamentally a financial issue — it isn't. It's a human one. But if you're the person building a business case for computer vision AI, you need to know the numbers. And the numbers are compelling. The conversation about safety ROI has traditionally been framed around cost avoidance: how much did we save by not having an injury? That's a valid lens, but it's incomplete. Computer vision AI delivers return across multiple categories

Commercial aviation has roughly doubled in safety every decade since the late 1960s. An MIT study found that the risk of a fatality from commercial air travel fell from 1 per 350,000 passenger boardings in 1968-1977 to 1 per 13.7 million in 2018-2022. IATA data shows accident rates declining from 3.72 per million flight sectors in 2005 to 1.32 in 2025. The FAA reports that US commercial aviation fatalities decreased by 95% over two decades. Now compare that trajectory to ware

There's a moment in most safety programmes where compliance stops working. Not because the rules are wrong. The rules are fine. Signage is up, procedures are documented, training has been delivered, and the audit trail is immaculate. Everyone knows what they're supposed to do. And yet the near-miss rate hasn't moved in six months. If you've worked in FMCG manufacturing, warehousing, or distribution, you've probably seen this plateau. The initial gains from putting a formal sa

Here's a pattern I see all the time. An organisation invests in safety technology. The system starts detecting events. The dashboard fills up with data. And then... nothing much changes. Not because the technology doesn't work. It works fine. The detection is accurate, the data is rich, and the dashboard looks impressive. The problem is that nobody has built the workflow between "we detected something" and "we did something about it." The data sits in the dashboard, gets revi

You've seen the demo. You're convinced the technology works. Now you need to convince everyone else. If you've ever tried to get budget approval for safety technology, you know the challenge. The EHS team is already on board. The CFO wants hard numbers. Operations wants to know it won't slow things down. IT wants to know it won't break things. And leadership wants to know why this investment, why now, and what happens if it doesn't work. Building a business case for computer

If you're evaluating computer vision AI for workplace safety , the privacy question will come up early. It might come from your data protection officer, your legal team, your workers' council, or from the workers themselves. And the question is legitimate: when you connect AI to cameras that watch people work, how do you protect those people's rights? The answer depends on how the platform is designed, how it processes data, and whether the vendor has built privacy into the a

Behaviour-based safety has been one of the most influential ideas in workplace safety for the past four decades. It's also one of the most divisive. Depending on who you ask, BBS is either a proven methodology that has saved countless lives, or an outdated framework that blames workers for systemic failures. The truth, as usual, sits somewhere in between. BBS gets several important things right, and those things deserve acknowledgment. But it also has structural limitations t

The hazards that travel with the truck The delivery environment is different from the warehouse in ways that make safety harder to manage. The driver works alone, at multiple sites, in conditions they can't fully control. Loading and unloading at customer sites Loading and unloading is one of the most hazardous activities in the trucking industry. OSHA notes that many fatalities occur when workers are crushed by forklifts that have overturned or fallen from loading docks dur

See how Epicurean Dairy used inviol on existing CCTV to reduce risk 48%.

Ports: where scale meets heavy consequence A modern container terminal is a high-traffic environment where enormous forces are in constant motion. Gantry cranes lift containers weighing up to 30 tonnes. Straddle carriers and reach stackers move between container stacks. Trucks and trailers flow through the terminal in continuous cycles. And throughout all of this, workers on foot are present, performing tasks that require them to be in proximity to moving equipment. The most

If you've spent any time in EHS, you've heard the terms "leading indicators" and "lagging indicators" more times than you can count. They come up in every safety conference, every board report, and every conversation about how to measure whether your safety programme is actually working. But here's the thing: most organisations still rely almost entirely on lagging indicators — even though everyone agrees that leading indicators are more valuable. And the reason isn't a lack

Walk into any warehouse or distribution centre and ask who owns safety. The answer is almost always the EHS team. Ask who owns throughput, layout decisions, delivery schedules, and traffic flow. That's operations. Now ask who owns the intersection where a forklift nearly hit a pedestrian this morning. Suddenly, it's less clear. In most organisations, safety and operations are managed as separate functions with separate reporting lines, separate KPIs, separate budgets, and sep

Every new technology comes with that slightly nervous question: what's this actually going to be like? You've seen the demo. You've read the case studies. You've spoken to a reference customer. But there's still a gap between "this looks great" and "this is working in our facility." That gap is the first 30 days, and in my experience working with new inviol customers, it's where the platform stops being a concept and starts being part of how your team operates. Here's what th

If I asked you to point to the most dangerous spot in your facility right now, you'd probably have a pretty good answer. The intersection near the loading dock. The blind corner behind Rack 12. The pedestrian crossing by the dispatch area. But would you be right? And more importantly, would you know whether it's more dangerous at 6am than at 2pm, whether the risk shifted after you rearranged the racking last month, or whether your third-party delivery drivers create a differe

Every AI safety platform looks impressive in a demo. The footage is clear, the detections are sharp, the dashboard is clean. You walk out thinking, "That looks amazing." But demos are designed to look amazing. The vendor controls the environment, the camera angles, the lighting, and the scenarios they show you. The real question is whether the platform will perform like that in your facility, with your cameras, your layout, and the messy reality of a working warehouse or manu

When you connect a computer vision AI platform to your CCTV cameras, you're handing it access to video feeds of your workplace. Footage of your people, your operations, your facility layout. That's a significant amount of trust to place in a technology vendor. So before you evaluate detection accuracy or dashboard features, there's a more fundamental question: how does this vendor protect your data? It's a question that doesn't get asked often enough. In procurement conversat

If you've spent any time in workplace safety, you've seen the triangle. It's probably on a poster somewhere in your office. It might be in your induction slides. It's almost certainly come up in a toolbox talk at some point. Heinrich's safety triangle (also called Bird's triangle, the accident pyramid, or the safety pyramid) is one of the most recognisable concepts in occupational health and safety. It's been shaping how we think about risk for over 90 years. But is it still

The scale of the problem Before we look at costs, it's worth understanding how common forklift accidents are. OSHA estimates between 35,000 and 62,000 forklift-related injuries occur annually in the US, with approximately 11% of all forklifts involved in an accident each year . That means if your facility has 10 forklifts, statistically at least one will be involved in an incident this year. In 2024, OSHA cited 2,248 forklift-related violations , with total penalties exceedi