Tallinn, ESTONIA, Nov. 09, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In a session at MiningTech North America, Tandm's chief revenue officer, Ethan Fleming-Cushing, will explain why investigators still find that a crew had noticed a hazard days before an incident, and what operators can change in how they capture and analyse frontline accounts. Tandm, which builds a conversational layer between frontline teams and the systems their company already runs, will demonstrate Tandm Intelligence live at the end of the session. The event runs at the Vancouver Convention Centre on 9 and 10 November.
Tandm Systems
Fleming-Cushing's argument is that frontline knowledge is lost twice: at capture, and again in analysis. Where the target is a count of conversations, what gets written down is often a one-line note that the discussion went well. On a form built around dropdowns, what a worker saw is reduced to a catch-all category. Analysis can then only show the categories on the form, so a question a leader asks today may have no answer in the records.
To show how this happens, he follows one hazard through a mine. An equipment operator tells a superintendent that contractor vehicles have started cutting across the haul road at shift change to save ten minutes. The conversation is logged as a good discussion. Over the following months other workers raise the same thing in their own words. Each report goes under a general traffic category, so no trend appears. After a near miss at the crossing, investigators find that people had been noticing it for months.
"Most safety leaders I meet can tell you how many leadership conversations their teams logged this year. Far fewer can tell you what their people were worried about," said Fleming-Cushing.
He also recommends two changes that work on whatever system an operator already runs. The first is to move one measure from how many conversations were held to what the team learned from them. The second is to let people describe what they saw in their own words, with someone there to ask the follow-up question. His test is to ask a question nobody planned for and check whether the answer is in the records.
In the demonstration that closes the session, a worker describes a hazard in plain words. Tandm asks the follow-up questions a good supervisor would ask and reads the account back, and the worker confirms it before it becomes a record. On a live site, that confirmed record goes into the safety system the operator already runs. Fleming-Cushing then puts a leadership question to Tandm Intelligence in plain English, and Intelligence builds a report from the accounts on file, with the records behind it open to read. The demonstration runs on a sample site with invented records.
Tandm is a Silver Sponsor of MiningTech North America. Visitors can report a hazard to Tandm in the language of their choice and see the record it produces. Operators who sign up at the stand can claim a free first month of Tandm.
About Tandm
Tandm helps frontline teams report hazards, incidents, observations and safety checks through a natural conversation, in the language and interface that works for them. It guides the worker, confirms the completed account and routes the structured record into the systems the company already uses. The same conversational layer can bring approved procedures and operational information back to the field.
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