Automated Scheduling & Better Training Systems for Improved Safety Culture

A dewatering and water treatment company that provides services and equipment to the construction industry found that it wasn’t easy to track and verify the effectiveness of their safety initiatives. This included processes and workflows around equipment inspection, job safety analysis, and probabilistic safety assessment studies. Overall, it was obvious to the safety leaders at the company that inefficiencies had trickled into the safety management process.

The reason for this was obvious: the company was using a manual system to track their health and safety workflows. The company had been founded in 1934; therefore, there was a lot of inherent knowledge around health and safety. But the lack of automation led to bottlenecks. It was time to implement a next-generation EHS solution and that is exactly what the company did by implementing ComplianceQuest EHS.

This is a common problem faced by many companies in the construction, engineering, and manufacturing industries. Manual and legacy systems may have worked well in the past when the organization was probably smaller and regulatory requirements were less stringent. But as the business scales and regulations evolve, automation is a “must-have”. If as a safety leader you don’t embrace automation and digital transformation, inefficiencies will trickle in and it’ll become impossible to build an enterprise-wide safety culture.

Challenges faced by employees and safety leaders using manual systems include:

• Difficulty in reporting incidents, near misses, and observations
• Inability to schedule “next steps” based on incident reporting
• Lack of visibility and traceability of incident management
• Inability to enforce safety rules
• Difficulty to collaborate with other stakeholders
• Inability to effect continuous improvement, especially because of lack of data

Automation and Digital Transformation of Safety Management

One of the biggest challenges the company faced was the cumbersome nature of reporting incidents and taking follow-up action; and the inability to draw insights to prevent future events.

Safety is not just about drafting policies and guidelines but also implementing them and training every employee to observe safe behavior to be able to make safety a part of the organizational culture.

Incidents and near misses were being communicated in multiple ways: using a combination of phone, verbal, and email communication. Scheduling was done using Excel (and three-ring binders!) to keep track of employee training. This was both laborious and time-consuming, making it difficult to schedule follow-up action and track whether action had been taken. It was also impossible to figure out the effectiveness of the safety training programs.

The company was using Salesforce for customer relationships and project management. It opted for ComplianceQuest’s EHS platform for an automated health, safety, and risk management solution as that would integrate with its existing CRM and business systems with ease.

By automating EHS, it was able to reduce incidence rates significantly, so much so that by 2020 it reached zero. Its processes of analysis and enforcement became more effective, which had an impact on reducing incident rates and increasing workplace safety.

Streamlined Scheduling and Training Systems

With the ComplianceQuest EHS solution, the company had a centralized safety document repository providing senior management with full visibility into site-specific and organization-wide safety data. They were able to run reports to spot potential issues, assess the risk level, and take corrective action with agility. The data being available to all field superintendents as well, they were able to continually log important information and update the ticket so that the management could get a thorough and accurate picture on-demand, anywhere and anytime.

Being a flexible solution, ComplianceQuest custom-designed field-scheduling and training applications for the company. The scheduling app pulls client data from Salesforce CRM to schedule equipment and personnel and graphically displays it in a calendar to enable deploying projects out to crews and equipment by location.

The training app enabled field employees to log into their unique profiles to assess their progress on training and certifications. The management was also able to track its training targets and a benchmark by location and position. Having access to enterprise-wide safety data in real-time turned out to be a game-changer for the company.

By automating the scheduling and training processes, the company was able to bring down its incidents to zero.

EHS for Automated Scheduling and Training

Achieving zero incidents is neither easy nor a one-time task. It has to be ongoing and requires continuous improvement through constant upgradation of processes and training. ComplianceQuest’s EHS solution enables building a safety culture by centralizing all incident data, near misses, safety observations, and investigations. This helps schedule required action as well as training. It enables maintaining documents related to action taken and the impact for future reference as well as regulatory submissions.

This access to real-time as well as historical data empowers safety leaders with insights that help with continuous improvement. With built-in analytics, predictive intelligence, dashboards, and mobile capabilities, safety leaders are empowered. They can assess and evaluate risks, prioritize, initiate mitigation, conduct root cause analysis and corrective and preventive action, and more.

To know more about how you can achieve zero incidents in your organization by automating scheduling and training, contact us now: https://www.compliancequest.com/lp/ehs/