Engineering Consultancy · Middle East, UK & Africa

From 20% to 98%: Making Incident Data Actually Trendable

A large international engineering consultancy was recording incidents across the Middle East, UK and Africa — but almost none of the data could be trended. We replaced manual data entry with a guided application built around mandatory verification fields, taking trendable data from 20% to 98%.

Industry
Engineering Consultancy
Regions
Middle East, UK & Africa
Scale
Large, multi-region operation
Timeline
~2 months, pipeline to deployment
Technologies
Power Apps · Power Automate · SharePoint · Power BI
20% → 98%
Incidents assigned a category and able to be trended
3 regions
Middle East, UK and Africa unified on one system
Zero
Incidents submitted without required categorisation data

The challenge

This client — a large international engineering consultancy — was recording health and safety incidents across three regions: the Middle East, the UK and Africa. On paper, incidents were being reported. In practice, the data behind those reports was close to unusable.

Incidents were logged manually, with no consistent structure enforced at the point of entry. Category, incident type and other key classification fields were often left blank or filled in inconsistently between regions. The result: fewer than 20% of incident reports carried enough structured detail to be included in any kind of trend analysis. Leadership had a stream of incident reports, but no reliable way to see what was actually happening across the business — which incident types were rising, where they were concentrated, or whether interventions were working.

The solution

The fix wasn't better reporting after the fact — it was making it impossible to submit an incomplete incident in the first place. We built an application that replaced manual data input entirely, with verification fields that require the necessary categorisation data before a report can be submitted at all.

1

Guided application — one standard way to report, everywhere

A single application replaced the inconsistent manual process across all three regions, giving every site the same guided, structured way to report an incident regardless of location.

2

Mandatory verification fields — no incomplete data gets through

Category, incident type and other key classification data are required fields. A report simply cannot be submitted until the necessary data is present, removing the inconsistency that had made most historical data untrendable.

3

Central register — every region, one structured dataset

Verified submissions flow automatically into a central register, replacing scattered regional records with a single, consistently structured source of truth.

4

Trend reporting — data leadership can actually act on

With complete, consistent categorisation on nearly every incident, trends by type, category and region became visible for the first time — turning a stream of individual reports into a dataset leadership could actually use.

5

Rollout & change management — bringing three regions with us

A new mandatory process across three regions only works if people actually use it properly. Alongside the build, we developed a dedicated comms pack and ran a webinar to walk teams through why the fields were changing and what was expected of them — helping drive adoption from day one rather than treating it as a bolt-on afterwards.

The results

The change in data quality was immediate and dramatic: the proportion of incidents with enough structured detail to be trended rose from under 20% to 98%. That shift changed what the business could actually do with its safety data.

Why it worked

The underlying problem was never a lack of data — it was that the data being collected couldn't be trusted or compared. By moving the quality check to the point of entry, rather than trying to clean up incomplete records afterwards, the business now gets usable, comparable data by default, from every region, every time.

The technical build was only part of it. The full pipeline — from initial scoping through internal meetings, build, comms pack, webinar and go-live — took around two months. Investing that time in properly explaining the change to teams across all three regions is a large part of why adoption reached 98% almost immediately, rather than the slow, patchy uptake that a purely technical rollout often sees.

Struggling to get usable trend data from your incident reports?

Book a free discovery call and we'll look at whether the same approach could work across your sites or regions.

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