SAFECORNER - Safety, Climate and Performance Appraisal of Heavy Machinery Supply Chain Members in Austria and Serbia as a Resilience Enhancement Tool

Value creation processes in companies along heavy machinery supply chains in the construction, mining and quarrying industry are recognized as major sources of pollution and occupational safety risks (e.g. accidents or injuries at work). For these reasons, both academia and practice are calling for sustainable supply chains. This challenges both managers and employees in their sphere of influence to work towards adapting their workplace to a socially, economically and ecologically organized working environment. Thus, it is necessary to develop transformation tools for all supply chain actors towards more sustainable business models with higher stainability but also organizational performance indicators. Especially in the Danube region that is not part of the EU, which includes Serbia, highly industrialized sectors such as construction, mining and quarrying face challenges characterized by low safety and poor health indicators. While in Serbia construction, mining, and quarrying industry is the leading sector in the growth of industrial production, Austrian companies producing heavy machinery are known as high-quality suppliers with high sustainability levels. Therefore, these countries in the mentioned industrial sectors - one in the production of heavy machinery and one in its operation - could serve as a perfect basis for examining possible economic solutions to the real problems related to environmental and social sustainability in these heavy machinery supply chains. The SAFECORNER project concept (i) uses opportunities and identified threats in both countries, (ii) connects the members of the upstream supply chain for heavy machinery - parts suppliers, manufacturers and dealers from Austria - with the members of the downstream supply chain, i.e. the owners of equipment as well as the users in Serbia and (iii) proposes a paradigm shift in the heavy machinery field from pure technology to an approach based on Human and Data-Centric Engineering. The results will enable companies in construction, mining, and quarrying industry to perform transitions through examination of safety climate, sustainability, and organizational performance dimensions. Furthermore, the findings of the SAFECORNER project will result in a model that will quantify relationships between examined sustainability factors in order to enable resilience assessment and enhancement as important support for further decision-making processes in companies within the entire heavy machinery supply chain.