How to Get Your Health and Safety Digitalization Project Funded

Organizations across sectors today need next-generation technologies, enabled by data and AI, for adopting a predictive approach towards meeting health and safety requirements. Using automation and digital transformation has become a “must-have” to make life easier for health and safety leaders, especially in highly regulated sectors.

Having a finger on the pulse of all health and safety metrics, in real-time, ensures the following benefits for any organization:

1. Enhanced productivity and efficiency of health & safety operations
2. Reduction of insurance premiums
3. Reduction of reportable incidents and fines
4. Reduction of enterprise risk – especially from product recalls and regulatory penalties
5. Building a health and safety-first culture across the enterprise

However, despite these advantages, getting a health and safety digitalization project funded often presents a roadblock due to many reasons such as cost, time, and data security. The common questions that come up, include:

Will there be operational disruption due to system downtime at the time of migration (from a legacy system)? How will the data in the legacy system integrate with the new system and will there be a loss of data? Will it require the staff to be trained to use the new system? If an organization is moving from a pen-and-paper manual system, leaders often worry about upfront costs.

We recently completed a webinar on the topic: Tips on how to get your Health and Safety Digitalization Project Funded. In this blog, we share a few key takeaways from the discussion.

Take it One Step at a Time

The concerns are well-founded and however exciting the thought of digital transformation may be, it is important to do a gap analysis based on the following health and safety maturity model:

This model categorizes the organization depending on the risk-safety vulnerability based on the company’s current digital journey. For instance, if the organization is in ‘Silo – Phase 2’, it could be a result of minimal process integrations and the business can only be reactive in nature. To understand how the company can move to the next phase, analyze the challenges and risks present within the departments. Lack of transparency and manual processes are some of the reasons why the integration process is affected.

For an EHS management solution to truly be effective, it has to interact with your ERP and CRM systems. While the end of digital transformation is to become both proactive and predictive, the critical first step is to get buy-in from your senior management to take it one step at a time. Go for a cloud-based EHS solution (like the one from ComplianceQuest) where you can buy logins for a few users, with a pay-per-user, per-month business model. Once the effectiveness is established, plan to scale it up. ComplianceQuest’s cloud-based EHS Solution is scalable, flexible, and customizable to suit the process and workflow needed for your business.

Seek Funding

Once the internal evaluation is complete, the next step is to approach the key decision-makers for approval and funding. Sometimes, in order to get a budget sanctioned for the health and safety digitalization project, one may have to present to a committee comprising several individuals.

While talking to senior leaders or a committee, keep in mind these four points to deliver the pitch effectively:

1. Language & Communication is key
While communicating with the executive team, it is important to speak their language. It is important to note that while safety professionals think of hazards, leadership looks at the risks. Communicating the need for digital transformation in terms of hazards and risks respectively will increase the chances of a favorable response. The key is to focus on the value proposition and benefits the project will deliver, especially from a financial perspective.

2. Think in Terms of People & Human Capital Management
In the manual process, human capital management suffers due to a lack of employee transparency. It is imperative to highlight the role of the digitalization project to improve transparency and accountability, thereby improving HCM. Creating a correlation between digitalization and improvement in productivity can be a compelling reason that can win approval for the project.

3. Cost ROI
For senior management leaders, the primary concern is often cost. Focus your presentation on the ROI that can be delivered by digitalizing health and safety workflows. Focus on key metrics that matter, including cost savings, increase in operational efficiency, and potential savings from hazards and penalties. Focus on how an EHS solution can help in mitigating people-related risk, equipment risk, and regulatory compliance risk.

4.Decision-making process
Leaders are often left with old data to support their decisions. To get the executive team to fund the project, focus on the advantages of a digital transformation effort, particularly the availability of real-time data to support a transparent decision-making process.

Automate with ComplianceQuest

The EHS Solution from ComplianceQuest is natively built from the ground up on the Salesforce.com platform. This makes it an ideal EHS solution for companies of all sizes, across several sectors including manufacturing, oil and gas, healthcare and life sciences, automotive, aerospace, agriculture, CPG, and hi-tech.

ComplianceQuest’s Health and Safety Management Solution delivers the following additional benefits to an enterprise, thanks to its ability to integrate with other business systems including EQMS, Environment Management, ERP, and CRM:

• Workforce digitalization with employee training
• Improving customer experience with Complaint Management
• Managing risk and compliance through audits and process inspection
• Creating a unified communication channel for supplier management
• Health and safety compliance with integrated regulatory forms
• Permit management to manage the environment and sustainability

The comprehensive suite of solutions comes with a basket of advantages, including

• Mobility for easy access
• Reliability and scalability
• Pre-validated and pre-integrated solution
• Ease of customization
• Maintenance and worry-free solution, thanks to a solution built from the ground up for the cloud
• Drives Continuous Improvement (CI)
• Serves as a single source of truth of all health and safety information
• Is a system of engagement that enables collaboration among stakeholders, rather than just being a system of record

For more information, contact us here: https://www.compliancequest.com/contact-us