Adelaide Airport strengthened its safety culture and streamlined enterprise risk management with Riskonnect, empowering staff to manage risk and capture incidents in real time across a complex operating environment.
Challenge
Adelaide Airport Limited operates one of Australia’s busiest airports, serving millions of passengers each year. It is home to a complex environment where most of the thousands of people who work on site – contractors, airline staff, and others – are not directly employed the airport itself. As this ecosystem continues to grow, managing the safety, compliance, and enterprise risk for such a complex operation becomes an increasing challenge.
“When you operate an airport, you’re responsible for the health and safety of everyone on-site, even when they’re not directly employed by you.”
– Zoe Joyce, head of risk, safety, and compliance at Adelaide Airport.
To meet this growing challenge, and ensure that passengers continued to have a safe, seamless and uninterrupted experience, Adelaide Airport set out to strengthen their safety culture and broaden their risk oversight. They needed to move away from the inconsistent reporting, manual follow-ups, and restricted visibility across departments that had been hampering their processes.
Adelaide Airport required an integrated, transparent approach to overseeing risk and safety. They would need a tracking and reporting platform that could ensure risk owners actively managed risks, and staff promptly reported incidents and hazards. And that platform would need to allow them to manage this entire undertaking with a small risk and safety team.
Solution
Since its implementation, Riskonnect has evolved into a trusted, enterprise-wide system that aligns with Adelaide Airport’s risk framework and review cycles, supporting real-time risk management and incident tracking. Hundreds of staff feed data into the platform daily, capturing hazards, and incidents while monitoring risk levels.
Staff can now easily log risks, incidents, and hazards, or perform risk assessments using mobile devices and tablets. They now act as the organisation’s early warning system, giving the team immediate visibility into issues.
Riskonnect also integrates with Adelaide Airport’s other operational systems, enabling seamless sharing of incident data. APIs ensure that information flows efficiently across platforms, giving the risk and safety team a comprehensive, real-time view of all logged hazards and incidents.
Regarding risks and hazards, Joyce notes that “the aim of the game [is to] pick it up before it becomes an incident.” Staff conduct three or four hazard inspections per month across various sites, with the platform providing an easy way to log hazards that can then be addressed quickly. When the staff log incidents or hazards in the system, the relevant personnel receive email notifications based on the type. With administrative tasks automated, Joyce says that the risk and safety team can “focus on the stuff that really adds value.”
“We couldn’t function with only three people in the risk team if our risk owners weren’t actively managing their risks.”
By empowering staff to manage their own risks, Riskonnect enables the small risk team to maintain real-time oversight and control.
Dashboards provide executives and board members with instant insight into hazards, incidents, and potential risks. “The dashboards are really important for us because if anyone asks us if there’s anything overdue, we can quickly go in and see it, doing live-time reporting,” Joyce notes. “Without those reports, we would spend a lot more time reporting than what we do,” she added. This highlights the platform’s efficiency and transparency at all levels of the organisation.
Results
With Riskonnect, Adelaide Airport has created a mature, proactive safety and risk management culture with full transparency and efficiency. Reporting across the airport has become more accurate across hazards, and incidents. By performing trend analysis on this stream of reliable data, teams can quickly identify emerging risks and respond before issues escalate.
The system’s closed feedback loop keeps employees engaged by showing outcomes of the hazards and incidents they report. “If people don’t see what’s happening in response to their reports, they stop reporting. Our staff know what’s being done, and that’s really important,” explains Joyce.
The benefits of Riskonnect have extended beyond improving safety. Automation has reduced administrative workload, allowing the risk and safety team to focus on strategy and continuous improvement. “Without automated reminders and dashboards, we’d spend significant time following up overdue risks,” Joyce says.
The platform also supports Adelaide Airport’s continuous improvement journey. Joyce notes, “Without a tool like Riskonnect, you wouldn’t have the time to continue advancing your maturity in this space.”
Board and executive visibility have also improved through automated reporting, which provides real-time oversight. “We’ve got a really switched-on board,” says Joyce. “Without the reporting modules, there’s no way we could put out the amount of reporting we do, and that goes straight up to the board.”
Above all, Riskonnect supports Adelaide Airport’s core mission of keeping people safe while maintaining smooth, reliable operations. Riskonnect helps prevent incidents from escalating, delivering safety, reliability, and operational excellence — ensuring every journey through the airport is as smooth and secure as possible.
“Our end game isn’t to save money, it’s to keep people safe.”
For more on enterprise risk management software, download our ebook, Engaging Everyone in Enterprise Risk Management for Business Success, and check out Riskonnect’s ERM software solution.
