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Other notable talks included Emily See, highways market director at Amey Consulting, who spoke about local authorities' approach to asset management. The talk explored how highways inspections didn’t include road markings and usually focused on carriageways, neglecting them as an important safety feature.

Emily encouraged us to consider all assets when inspecting roads and how maintaining them would lead to better road conditions. As a use case Dorset County Council explained how they used technology to better understand road marking conditions based on need and potential risk. Using data from a retro-reflectivity survey, line marking visibility data gathered using an AI-aided system and STATS19 collision data they could analyse each road and see where there was a high risk to safety.

Through this technology they identified £400k of road marking improvements and used the case study to secure the additional £200k needed to complete the necessary work.

Jon Munslow, local authority consultant gave a talk on Strategic View on Road Marking Resilience exploring how we meet net zero targets through low carbon solutions including:

• Plant based resins

• Recycled plastics

• Industrial by products

• Geo polymers

• Solar power

• Thermochromic

• Carbon capturing

Greg Clark, managing director of QMS, delivered a thought-provoking talk titled, ‘Temporary traffic management guidance: embracing change’. He presented guidance, in partnership with the RSMA, on implementing effective temporary traffic management measures in road marking to protect the safety of the public and the workforce.

Greg shared QMS as a case study where they been training their operatives on temporary traffic management measures on rural Devon roads. He encouraged embracing change and improving worksite safety for the road marking sector.

Demystifying digitisation

Rob Shearing, chief executive of the RSMA, promoted this year’s show as an opportunity to demystify digitisation – to provide clarity about the process of adopting software solutions like field management for companies who haven’t yet taken the leap.

Continuing on the theme of safety Ashley Wing, our CMO, and Julie Davidson, head of QSHE at Jointline, collaborated with the talk, ‘Navigating the road ahead: driving change in field operations’.

The presentation offered important insights on the benefits of field management software including:

• Software adding a layer of safety protection
  Julie explained the 'Swiss Cheese' theory of accident causation, which illustrates how safety prevention works in layers. Each layer of protection – training, PPE, equipment checks – contributes to a solid safety system, but each also has its own ‘holes’, or areas of risk. Accidents occur when these holes align, creating a chain of failures. Implementing digital field management adds multiple extra layers of protection and ‘narrows’ these holes, vastly reducing the chances of those failures lining up.
  

• Digital systems enhancing compliance
  Implementing digital field management systems enables businesses to capture real-time data, facilitating robust analysis. It makes it easier for QC teams and other managers to quickly identify those patterns that might signal early compliance issues before they escalate.
  

• Fatigue tracking providing proactive safety management
  Digital systems can automatically flag and halt potential safety concerns, such as employees exceeding Working Time Directive hours. The software automatically stops these operatives from being scheduled, or alerts the person in charge of scheduling, enabling timely interventions to prevent fatigue-related incidents.
  

• Reduction of human error
  Digital systems reduce human error by providing other safeguards like qualification checks, thereby strengthening compliance and decreasing the chances of system failures leading to accidents.

In his part of the collaboration, Ashley Wing emphasised the transformative impact of digital workflow management systems, and provided everyone in attendance with a digital implementation checklist – a framework for companies to consider for a successful digital implementation.

Overall, the show was full of interesting forward-looking takes on the future of road marking.

Download the digital implementation checklist