The Journey of How a Construction Industry Pioneer Transformed Its Safety Management Process in Just 12 Weeks

At ComplianceQuest, we recently organized a webinar featuring one of our clients, the VP of operations and safety at a leading construction services company in the dewatering space. The company has been in business for over 80 years, solving complex problems related to groundwater management in the construction industry.

In the webinar, the safety leader jumped straight to the point and spoke about why in this day and age a manual system to manage safety processes won’t work.

He believes organizations which use a manual system to track safety processes suffer from:

• Decentralized, non-automated processes which work only in silos
• Lack of collaboration, accountability and transparency of safety data
• Insufficient data for decision making
• Inability to drive continuous improvement of workflows or processes

In this blog, we highlight how this company digitally transformed its safety management process in just 12 weeks and – in the process – took its total recorded incident rate (TRIR) to 0 in 2020.

The Automation Journey

As a business dealing with different industries such as institutional and commercial construction, manufacturing, oil and gas, infrastructure, the dewatering company handles dozens of safety forms and incident reports on a daily basis. With several locations across the country, it was difficult for the organization to handle these tasks manually.

To facilitate the growing needs of the business and to remain compliant with necessary health and safety standards, the organization had to:

• Implement a safety incident management solution
• Digitize its risk and controls process, worksite and equipment inspection workflows
• Establish project scheduling tools
• Drive collaboration among key stakeholders
• Ensure safety and operational leaders had dashboards to track all key safety metrics on-the-go

The company evaluated various tools but decided to go with ComplianceQuest for the following reasons: 1) Our solution was highly scalable, flexible and customizable and the company could automate the process on its terms

2) ComplianceQuest, having been built on the Salesforce platform, easily integrated with Salesforce which the company was already using

3) Our solution was mobile-ready, ensuring that safety events and incidents could be tracked or acted on from anywhere, anytime.

According to the safety leader on the client side, the ComplianceQuest EHS solution actually brings together three capabilities — EHS management, risk management, and scheduling — and offers several key benefits such as:

• Increased visibility across the service lifecycle
• Improved safety culture that results in a more organized and productive operational effectiveness and confidence levels
• Easy access to crucial data that helps in identifying risks to make informed decisions around risk mitigation

Using the Agile Methodology for Implementation

The dewatering contractor decided to adopt a 12-week process for the digital transformation of its safety management process. Considering the size of the company’s operations, this was an aggressive schedule but the company was able to stick to this thanks to a collaborative effort between ComplianceQuest and the customer.

The whole transformation program was split into 6-steps and started with the company downloading the app from Salesforce AppExchange:

1. Initiation
2. Design
3. Configure
4. Test
5. Implement
6. Maintenance Processes

During the project design phase, the team did the following:

• Familiarized itself with the existing business processes
• Created a database of different forms that needed to be mapped
• Listed the digital signatures required
• Defined the incident and approval processes

Once the system configuration and report design process were complete, the team moved to on-site user acceptance and training (UAT) with 2-3 days of training workshops, executive sessions, and tactical sessions with the safety team. Representatives from the company with different clearance levels and access checked the system for functionality, intuitiveness, and capabilities. The updates were completed with profile and permission settings, system debug, and final bandwidth checks before going live based on the UAT feedback.

Being early adopters of the digital health and safety system, the company successfully automated health and safety standards in 2017, which helped with real-time access to safety data, reduce risk, and improve workplace safety.

Over time, the company witnessed a steady decline in incident rates, and by 2020, it reached zero.

Watch the in-depth webinar here.

Impact and Outcome of Implementing a Cloud-based EHS

Through the above example, it is evident that automation requires a highly customizable, cost-effective, intuitive software solution. Until automation entered the construction industry, businesses faced challenges related to accident prevention due to difficulty in adhering to health and safety standards.

A cloud-based software gives organizations the room and freedom to add features and capabilities such as customer complaint management, safety checklists, inspection management, remote audits, and risk management while keeping the investment future-safe.

Using the ComplianceQuest EHS solution helped the company see the following benefits immediately:

• Increased accountability and transparency by replacing paper-based forms, folders, and checklists with a modern, fully automated, cloud-based EHS
• Custom-designed field scheduling and training applications to pull client data from Salesforce CRM to schedule equipment maintenance and personnel training
• Connected EHS platform that enabled ease of a collaboration, a key necessity to truly reduce incident rates

Features of ComplianceQuest QHSE (EQMS + EHS) software

ComplianceQuest QHSE (EHS + EQMS) software is a holistic platform developed to meet the requirements of various standards, including ISO 9001:2015, ISO 14001, ISO 18001/45001, and ISO 31000. Its features include

• Metrics and reporting
• Quality assurance
• Event and hazard reporting
• Investigations
• Corrective/Preventive actions
• Quality control

ComplianceQuest offers an integrated platform to implement, manage, and enhance workplace safety and compliance by seamlessly connecting all Quality, Health, Safety, Environment workflows, and data.

ComplianceQuest is among the fastest-growing, 100% modern cloud-based Enterprise Quality and Safety Management systems in the market, that is natively built and run on the Salesforce platform.

For more information, or to request a demo with a ComplianceQuest expert, visit here:
https://www.compliancequest.com/online-demo