Unless you are buying a Lamborghini – just because you absolutely HAVE to have it, or the latest smartphone – just because it looks better – parting with your often scarce funding resource has to make financial sense. This is usually calculated by the return you get on your investment – spend X and you will make Y. If the return meets the required investment targets, the decision to spend the money is easily justified.
Sadly, when it comes to Health and Safety, and therefore to Risk Management, the decision is not quite so black and white. Making sure your employees are working in a healthy and safe space and deciding on what must be spent to maximise this is based on what MIGHT happen, and how devastating the consequence will be if it does happen. These, often intangible, parameters make decision-making complicated and very difficult to quantify.
How, therefore, as a business leader, do you decide on how much to spend on Health and Safety, and therefore workforce management (WFM) and, once you have decided, justify the cost?
Fortunately, in our fast-growing IT serviced world, health and safety software can assist significantly with this. Here are some of the ways it can help.
USING INCIDENT REPORTING SOFTWARE TO IDENTIFY HIGH-FREQUENCY INCIDENTS
Software that allows you to capture and report incidents in your business, real-time, gives you a history of H&S incidents that can then be analyzed, understood, and easily reported. Understanding lost working days due to different types of incidents (including emotional and stress-related incidents) allows you to put better controls in place to mitigate the most highly recurring ones. Being able to understand in which specific areas incidents occur allows you to understand high-risk areas, and to better manage those areas.
ALL THIS DATA, THAT IS EASILY COLLATED AND REPORTED, ALLOWS YOU TO BETTER PREDICT H&S INCIDENTS, AND THEREFORE THE MINIMISE THEM.
Once you understand the most frequently recurring incidents and the reasons, therefore, you can confidently justify spending the money to reduce them, and easily quantify the return you will get on your investment.
The great news is that as H&S software to assist with WFM management is being adopted more and more, so the cost thereof is reducing significantly, and cost-effective solutions such as Rapid Incident – an online system for reporting workplace safety and incidents – offered by OVS Solutions are readily available and cost-effective to implement.
SAVING TIME AND IMPROVING ACCURACY ON INPUTTING DATA
Ask any manager in any business what they spend much of their time doing, and they will tell you it is providing data. The administrative burden placed on managers in business today, as compliance requirements become increasingly more stringent, is both costly and unproductive. Time is too often swallowed up because data must be re-entered, reworked, searched for, and updated.
SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS THAT ALLOW EVERYONE TO WORK OFF A COMMON DATABASE, REDUCES THE NEED TO REPEAT DATA ENTRY, AND THEREFORE SAVES SIGNIFICANT TIME AND MONEY.
Software solutions, such as the Rapid health and safety software offered by OVS Solutions, allows your team to work off one central, cloud-based database. This means the same data can be accessed from anywhere, at any time, by anyone who has the access permission to do so. It also means that data already in the system is pre-populated, making re-entry unnecessary. This makes sure naming conventions are uniform, which allows for far more accurate reporting and analysis. It also significantly reduces errors on data input and, most importantly, saves your team time.
BY USING WFM SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS, YOU ARE ABLE TO INCREASE ACCURACY AND SAVE TIME.
Once again, it is not a difficult calculation to quantify the % time saved by each team member x their salary cost to justify the spend on tools like offered by OVS Solutions!
REDUCING THE COST OF YOUR CONTRACTOR’S COMPLIANCE
Due to increased compliance requirements, many companies these days find themselves spending considerable time on ensuring their contractors are compliant when on site. As many contractors cannot be relied upon to do so themselves, it becomes the responsibility of the company to ensure their contractors are compliant. In our view, one of the areas that H&S Software makes the most significant improvement for any company is in software solutions like Rapid Contractor Management.
SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS LIKE RAPID CONTRACTOR MANAGEMENT ALLOW COMPANIES TO ENSURE THEIR CONTRACTORS ARE COMPLIANT AND APPROVED BEFORE THEY ARRIVE ON SITE.
This means you can ask your contractor to electronically upload all their safety forms, qualifications, certificates, and permits before they arrive on site. They can complete all the H&S data they need to supply specifically for your company, and even ensure that each contractor employee that will be arriving on site is certified. Better yet, the Rapid Permit to Work software solution will also allow automatic issue of workforce permits at the same time if required!
Software like Rapid Visitor Access will then integrate with Rapid Contractor Management and RAPID PERMIT TO WORK and allow the contractor and their employees access automatically when they arrive on site.
SIGNIFICANT SAVINGS ARE ALWAYS REALISED WHEN USING CONTRACT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE – THE MOST OBVIOUSLY BEING THE ELIMINATION OF COSTLY DELAYS WHEN A CONTRACTOR ARRIVES UNCERTIFIED ON SITE.
BETTER COMMUNICATION
Keeping everyone in the company updated with ever-changing and ever-increasing policy and procedure is a daunting task, and something companies struggle to maintain. Compliance requirements in each industry changes monthly, weekly, and even daily. Being able to translate these requirements into practical policy and procedure for your company and effectively communicate this to everyone in the company at the right time takes careful planning and can easily frustrate team members who have limited time in which to perform.
BEING ABLE TO QUICKLY UPDATE EXISTING POLICIES USING VERSION CONTROL, OR CREATE NEW POLICIES, AND ELECTRONICALLY NOTIFY AND ASSIGN THESE UPDATES TO TEAM MEMBERS SAVES CONSIDERABLE TIME AND ENSURES EVERYONE IS KEPT UPDATED TIMEOUSLY.
Companies like OVS Solutions offer products like Rapid Induct, which are cloud-based software solutions that allow you to determine who needs to review selected policy and procedure, or just daily communications, based on their job specification and permission levels. The software automatically assigns a review of such at a frequency determined by your company, or when a version change takes place. Team members are given a limited period in which to review and answer questions to ensure their understanding, in their own time. This can be done off their smartphone or laptop, so team members are not required to attend group training at a time that may not be convenient for them. RISK MANAGEMENT BECOMES EASILY INGRAINED INTO YOUR COMPANY CULTURE USING TOOLS LIKE THIS.
Whilst the efficiency of staff being updated timeously and communicated to at the same time is hard to quantify (but extremely mitigative of cost), getting a 100% training compliance record is – making the software investment easily justified!
CLOSING THE LOOP
Audits to check those compliance requirements and reduce risk to ensure your company’s health & safety are essential. RISK MANAGEMENT is often costly, must be done at regular intervals and the findings thereof actioned. Keeping track of the audits required for the entire company is challenging, never mind the actions that arise from them. HAVING SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS THAT AUTOMATICALLY KEEP TRACK OF ALL YOUR H&S AUDIT REQUIREMENTS IS ONE OF THE MOST TIME EFFICIENT AND EFFECTIVE SOLUTIONS YOU COULD EMPLOY.
The best thing about software solutions like Rapid Audit is that TASK MANAGEMENT becomes far more easily tracked and managed!
Solutions like Rapid Audit and Rapid Service Alert, as offered by OVS Solutions, make this efficiency possible at a very low cost and with extremely quick implementation time. The investment in such a solution is easily justified to any Financial Director when the result is peace of mind that compliance is being attained!
CONCLUSION
Companies like OVS Solutions (Pty) Ltd, the African and Europe Licensee of the award-winning Rapid Global Software, have been delivering compliance software solutions for over 20 years. Their only business is the continued development and improvement of their software, to make sure that the solutions keep pace with the ever-changing landscape. They have used the learning of over 3 million users worldwide to develop a product that speaks to an organization’s Health & Safety needs. Visit our WFM Software Products page to see what their solutions offer.
OVS Solutions, the African and Europe Licensee of Rapid Global, also have a great support team who are available to assist with live demonstrations, user guides and relevant information you may require. They can help you deliver on your plan. Contact OVS Solutions today for any questions on our workforce management software solutions or to request a product demo.
Contact us at sales@ovs-solutions.com