Safety Reporting System

In high-intensity manufacturing environments, safety is more than just a compliance requirement—it’s a fundamental part of operational excellence. At Unilever, a global consumer goods leader, managing safety incidents quickly and consistently across its large network of factory employees is essential for both employee well-being and production continuity.

However, their legacy process for handling safety reports—via chat and email—was fragmented, slow, and lacked real-time visibility. To modernize this workflow, Unilever partnered with MLTech Soft to build a digital safety reporting system that would empower every employee to actively contribute to a safer work environment.

The Challenge: Delayed and Incomplete Safety Reporting in High-Risk Environments

With thousands of workers operating in dynamic factory environments, Unilever needed a fast, reliable, and centralized way to track and manage safety incidents. Several critical challenges stood in the way:

• Fragmented communication: Safety events were being reported via various chat groups, emails, or even verbal messages, resulting in information loss and miscommunication.

• Delayed response times: Without structured reporting, critical safety risks often went unnoticed or unresolved for hours—or even days.

• Low visibility for supervisors: Managers had no centralized dashboard or system to track incident patterns or respond in real time.

• Manual reporting burden: Employees were often discouraged from reporting near-misses or unsafe conditions due to the inconvenience of manual processes.

• Lack of predictive insights: Unilever had no way to aggregate and analyze safety data to identify recurring hazards or predict future risks.

These issues posed both a safety risk and an operational inefficiency, especially across large-scale factories running 24/7.

The Solution: AI-Driven Incident Detection and Mobile Reporting Tools

MLTech Soft designed and deployed a cross-platform Safety Reporting System, developed as a mobile-first solution to ensure maximum adoption among factory workers.

The mobile application—available on both Android and iOS—enables users to quickly report three main categories of safety incidents:

• Unsafe actions

• Unsafe conditions

• Near-miss events

Reports can be submitted with photos, descriptions, and location data—even when offline. Once the device reconnects to the internet, all data is automatically synced to a central server, ensuring that no report is ever lost due to connectivity limitations.

To further enhance responsiveness and reduce human error, MLTech Soft integrated an AI-powered camera module into the system. This feature uses machine vision to detect unsafe behaviors—such as missing protective gear or proximity to hazardous zones—and automatically triggers real-time alerts to supervisors.

The backend system is hosted on Microsoft Azure, offering enterprise-grade scalability, availability, and data protection. For analytics and reporting, we integrated Power BI, giving supervisors and management teams a live dashboard to monitor trends, review incident categories, and assess site-level safety performance.

The Result: Safer Workplaces Powered by Real-Time Data and Alerts

The Safety Reporting System has now been operational at Unilever for over five years and is actively used by more than 1,000 factory employees around the clock. It has fundamentally reshaped how safety is managed and reported across the company’s facilities.

Since implementation, the platform has significantly accelerated incident response times by enabling real-time alerts and centralized tracking—minimizing exposure to potential risks. With its intuitive mobile interface, employees are now more engaged in the reporting process, leading to higher participation rates and a stronger culture of safety awareness. Supervisors benefit from consistent, verified data that improves the quality and speed of decision-making, while the AI-powered detection system proactively identifies unsafe conditions before they escalate into serious incidents. At the management level, real-time dashboards powered by Power BI provide strategic oversight, helping teams monitor safety trends and make data-informed improvements across sites.

More than just a reporting tool, this solution has helped Unilever foster a safety-first mindset—empowering every employee to play an active role in building a safer, more responsive workplace.