CONSTRUCTION & SITE SAFETY
COMPLIANCE ON A CLOUD
Safetybank’s founder and CTO, Jody Kennedy, a construction industry veteran, advises on how SaaS can help bring health and safety compliance firmly into the 21st century.
I wonder how many of you were slightly put off from reading any further because of the reference to SaaS. The ratio may well be higher within smaller construction companies where ‘Software as a Service’ solutions are often incorrectly perceived as being firmly in the domain of big companies.
Nothing could be further from the truth. SaaS simply means that the software needed is delivered via the Cloud (i.e. the internet) and you only pay for what you use or, in the case of Safetybank, per user. The big advantage of SaaS applications, especially when combined with today’s mobile technology, is your employees are ‘always connected’ and can access them from any mobile device, wherever they are working.
For those of you responsible for H&S compliance a SaaS Health & Safety (H&S) management system is quite simply ‘manna from heaven’. Not just for your own company, but for your entire supply chain.
Imagine this: your company is working on a congested commercial construction site. You may be the main contractor or one of many sub-contractors, but still the need to comply with H&S applies to every company. It is likely that each company will have its own way of handling H&S, its own filing systems, its own way of recording potential hazards, equipment maintenance and staff training.
What this organised H&S ‘chaos’ means is a real and very present danger of vital H&S information being misplaced or miscommunicated, resulting in accidents, injuries and avoidable fatalities.
www.tomorrowshs.com
Let’s not forget the construction industry is one of the most dangerous in which to work. The latest statistics from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) show there were 42 fatal injuries to construction workers in 2013/14. It is the responsibility of everyone across the construction industry and its supply chain to do everything in their power to eliminate avoidable life threatening accidents.
Safetybank’s SaaS H&S management system, which harnesses the power of cloud and mobile technology to allow every individual involved in a construction project to access accurate and consistent H&S information online from any mobile device, can play a key role in doing just that.
A word of warning, though: as you realise the need to bring your outdated, paper-based H&S management system firmly into the 21st century, be sure to conduct market research around the SaaS solutions that are available.
Beware of the plethora of existing software products being ‘relaunched’ as a ‘construction specialist product’. Many will have been simply tweaked to include a few more construction related fields, added appropriate imagery and quirky adaptations.
Other construction businesses are hiring costly (high CAPEX) developers and/or development houses to build ‘bespoke’ applications. Unfortunately, many of them will not have truly identified the maintenance, updating and support costs (high OPEX) that will continue long beyond the delivery of the initial application.
Another danger to avoid is looking at an H&S system simply to make
“IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF EVERYONE ACROSS THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY AND ITS SUPPLY CHAIN TO DO EVERYTHING IN THEIR POWER TO ELIMINATE AVOIDABLE LIFE THREATENING ACCIDENTS.”
it easier to manage safety. Many businesses will convince themselves all they need is a reporting and measurement tool.
Safety in construction (or in any sector) should never be about KPI measurement and those construction businesses who claim to have ‘nailed’ this as the major H&S requirement are sorely mistaken.
You must look for a SaaS H&S management system that is a holistic tool working across all CDM defined roles and individual responsibilities, regardless of job title or activity. You need a tool that drives safety performance and delivers H&S compliance as a result of the information it delivers and not the other way around.
The construction industry operates very differently to almost every other sector. A deep understanding of how the day-to-day operations and landscape of productivity works is essential. It is most unlikely that an ‘outsider’ can deliver a successful SaaS solution to work within our industry.
Talk to an expert and make sure you are assessing a SaaS H&S management system that has been built from the ground up specifically for the construction industry.
www.safetybank.co.uk 37
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