Ardent Leisure digitises safety checks at Dreamworld

Ardent Leisure Group, the operator of Dreamworld, has digitised the way it manages and reports safety incidents across the theme park, and has piloted internet of things (IoT) monitoring for at least one set of checks.

The project started in about 2018 and saw the implementation of software from ServiceNow in January 2019, change and implementation manager Brett Aspel told this week’s ServiceNow Knowledge 2021 conference.

“We’ve been using ServiceNow since 2019 - we went live in January of that year - to handle all of our risk and compliance-related inspections, our in-park incident management, our preventative and reactive maintenance on all of our attractions, our facilities management or work requests throughout the park [and] all work orders,” Aspel said.

“Every single thing that happens in the theme park campus is reported through ServiceNow.”

Herman Taljaard, head of smart operations at Enable Professional Services - the ServiceNow partner that helped Ardent with the project - said the safety inspection and reporting system was tendered for a year prior.

“In 2018, Dreamworld were going out to market to find a solution to help manage safety inspections and reporting of safety incidents across the park, and they selected ServiceNow as the platform of choice,” Taljaard said.

“One of the key reasons for that was that ServiceNow brought a number of modules to the solution, including governance, risk and compliance (GRC), customer services management as well as field services, which in combination were all required to implement the safety inspection system. 

“We commenced work in the second half of 2018 on developing the solution, and essentially we started by developing safety inspection checklists that the safety and engineering team can use every morning before the theme park opens to complete their safety inspections.

"These were traditionally done on paper and it was really difficult to cross-reference from one day to the next what’s been happening. 

“The digitisation of these checklists then allowed the inspection teams to very quickly log issues which automatically would raise a work order if any inspection item might have failed or was outside of acceptable tolerances.”

IoT on food storage

Much of the presentation focused on specific checking around food safety, for which Dreamworld was a pilot customer for ServiceNow’s nascent ‘connected operations’ IoT platform, which was only launched publicly at the end of last year.

Aspel said the IoT system is being used to automatically monitor and log temperatures of over 100 fridges and freezers across the theme park, and to alert food and beverage (F&B) - or park security outside of hours - if something is amiss.

Previously, temperature checks were performed hourly in park hours and manually recorded by customer service teams at food outlets, or by onsite security out-of-hours.

“Over 100 fridges and freezers are being monitored, and over half of them need to be monitored both day and night,” Aspel said.

Dreamworld signed on to the global ‘connected operations’ pilot and trialled the technology at its ice cream parlour.

“If it's warmer than [tolerance levels allow] and it's between our normal business hours, we need to alert our F&B supervisor team so they can come out and they can take action to figure out what's going on with that freezer,” Aspel said.

“If it's outside of our trading hours, we need to alert a completely separate team, our overnight security team. 

“They'll come in, they'll evaluate the situation, and whatever the action is taken, whether it's to move stock to a different freezer or shut a freezer door if something's been left open, or calling in a technician, that's all recorded through the ServiceNow platform.”

The IoT platform is now used park-wide for food safety. 

Aspel said the new benefits of the new system were particularly apparent at audit time.

“When we have our food safety inspectors from the local government come in, they want to see … every [temperature] reading,” Aspel said.

“Before ServiceNow was handling those readings, that was a three-day job for a senior member of our F&B team to sit there and pull out every piece of paper relating to a particular outlet, get all of those sensor temperature readings, collate them all, find all of the different work orders that have been generated from them, find any notes from the security guards that they'd put together overnight from their readings, put it all together, collate it and hand that over to our inspectors. 

“Now they click a button and it'll just pop up on the screen, they hit print, they hand over that printout and it's done. 

“It's pretty amazing seeing a three day job go down to 30 minutes for an entire theme park.”

The system also saved about 500 hours of customer service time each year.

In addition, Aspel noted that Dreamworld was now able to take more frequent temperature readings.

“We're [now] taking the readings every minute, we're recording every 20 minutes, and we're generating work orders based on that,” he said.

“The entire platform runs more smoothly, but also at a much higher frequency, giving us much better data and better trending [information] where you can see even when a fridge or freezer goes into defrost mode, if it's automated or if it's having an issue.

“The system is really producing a lot of benefits there.”