From Broken Safety App to 35,000+ Leadership Observations, Anglo American’s Custom Safety Mobile App

What Problem Did Anglo American Face?

Anglo American had purchased a vendor-supplied mobile application for field-based safety data capture. However, the app could not handle group-scale usage. It struggled when more than one person tried to sync simultaneously, and a single-user sync took over 10 minutes. As a result, safety observations were reconstructed from memory hours later at a desktop. Consequently, critical context like location, conditions, and personnel present was lost.

Why Did It Have to Change?

Anglo American’s Safety and Sustainable Development (S&SD) division set a clear benchmark. Specifically, they required an offline-capable mobile application that could sync in under one minute and support 100 concurrent users. Without a functioning mobile tool, the group’s safety observation programmes could not operate as designed.

How Did NxGN Build the Safety Mobile App?

Phase 1: Building the Safety Mobile App (2022-2023)

NxGN tackled the highest-risk technical challenges in a three-month POC. Specifically, the team validated SSO integration, EHS platform connectivity, and a sync algorithm fast enough to transfer master data in under one minute. As a result, all core technical risks were retired before full development began.

Subsequently, NxGN built the full safety mobile app across 2023. The app launched as a native mobile platform for iOS and Android with an offline-first architecture. Furthermore, the UX was designed for mining environments where personnel wear PPE and gloves in physically demanding conditions with intermittent connectivity.

Phase 2: Driving VFL Adoption (Late 2024-2025)

In late 2024, Anglo American identified Visible Felt Leadership as the key safety metric they wanted to drive across the group. The thinking was clear: leaders being physically present and engaged in on-the-ground operations would embed good safety practices from the top down.

Anglo American created a structured incentive programme tied to management bonuses. Each responsible leader had to complete a set number of VFL observations per week at a defined quality level. In addition, leaders had to conduct coaching VFLs and maintain a balanced split between contractor and employee observations. This was not a tick-box exercise; it required genuine engagement.

To support this programme, NxGN enhanced the safety mobile app with three adoption features:

A live progress dashboard gave each leader visibility into their own targets. Specifically, leaders could see how many VFLs they had completed, what they still needed to achieve, and whether they were on track for their bonus. This removed ambiguity and made target progress visible in real time.

An operational leaderboard gamified the adoption across operations. Leaders could see who was performing best within their site and across the group. As a result, healthy competition emerged between operations, with teams pushing each other to improve their numbers.

A quality and badges system rewarded the right behaviours. NxGN introduced badges for the highest-quality observations, recognising leaders who wrote detailed, actionable VFL records. Importantly, the system also identified people copying and pasting descriptions across observations, surfacing low-effort compliance rather than genuine safety engagement.

Technical detail: V2.0 platform architecture

Alongside the adoption features, V2.0 delivered a fundamental architectural evolution. Biometric authentication replaced cumbersome login flows for users wearing PPE. ArcGIS geofencing automatically determined the workplace via GPS, eliminating the most common data entry error. Delta-based synchronisation replaced full data transfers with incremental updates. Furthermore, a decoupled microservices architecture on Azure separated the mobile app from the central EHS platform, with 80% code coverage across all API layers.

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What Were the Results?

How Did the Safety Mobile App Fix the Technical Problem?

Metric	Before (vendor app)	After (NxGN safety mobile app)	Improvement
Master data sync time	10+ minutes per user	Under 60 seconds	90%+ reduction
Concurrent sync capacity	1 user	100 concurrent users	From single-user to group-scale
Safety data capture	Desktop entry hours later	Mobile capture at point of observation	Real-time capture with full context

How Did VFL Adoption Take Off? (Jan 2025 to Mar 2026)

Importantly, VFL is a leadership programme. Site managers and supervisors conduct these observations during face-to-face safety interactions with frontline workers. Consequently, these numbers represent Anglo American’s on-site leadership population, not the full 60,000-person workforce.

Metric	Result
Active VFL leaders	1,154 site leaders conducting observations
Total VFL observations	35,324 records captured across all sites
Average per leader	Over 30 observations each; consistent habitual use, not occasional compliance

Indeed, Anglo American’s bonus-linked programme drove exactly the behaviour it intended. The dashboard gave leaders clarity on their targets. The leaderboard created visible competition between operations. The badges rewarded quality over quantity. Together, the safety mobile app became an integral part of how Anglo American’s leadership engages with safety on the ground.

What Was the Broader Impact?

The transformation went beyond technical metrics alone. With a functioning mobile tool and a gamified adoption layer, Anglo American’s VFL programme could finally operate as designed. Leaders now capture what they observe, where they observe it, the moment they observe it. Consequently, the gap between observation and record has closed, and the quality controls ensure that every record reflects a genuine safety interaction.