Construction Safety Software Might Be Making You Less Safe
- 27 July 2022
The team at Construction Co. is super excited! Today they are going live with new safety software.
Construction Co. is a typical heavy civil construction company with 250 large pieces of equipment and approximately the same number of employees. The safety paperwork is endless. Any piece of equipment running on any day requires an Equipment Checklist to be completed while numerous Hazard Assessments (JHAs and FLHAs) are required from fuelers, mechanics and drivers. After adding toolbox meetings and other miscellaneous safety paperwork, Construction Co. should be collecting nearly 200 completed safety forms daily. Before implementing this new safety software, Construction Co. was only averaging 100 collected forms per day –less than 50% compliance.
Less than 50% compliance is a major concern to Construction Co. The very act of completing safety paperwork is estimated to reduce the probability of serious accidents by more than 50%. And, if a serious accident or incident does happen and safety paperwork is missing, the consequences and fines from OHSA will be very severe indeed.
A major selling feature of Construction Co’s new safety software was that team members can now submit safety forms electronically. This will definitely make compliance go up, right?!
Wrong! Three weeks after going live, which had its own challenges, daily safety form submissions dropped to just 65 per day and two weeks after that it was down to just 45. What happened?!
It’s a far too common tale and the problem is simple – “What gets measured gets done and what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done”. In a paper world, the act of the Foreman collecting safety paperwork at least drove some compliance. Now the frictionless cyberspace submissions were just too easy to ignore and too cumbersome to ensure completeness. Operators and JHA incumbents quickly figured this out and even less forms were submitted. Safety software fail!
It's important to point out that accurately determining completeness of safety paperwork is extremely tricky. Using JHAs as an example, unless you know every event happening inside your company you will never be able to identify missing JHAs. The same applies to daily Equipment Checklists. Unless you know exactly what pieces of equipment are operating today, which requires knowing what is active, parked or under repair, managing safety paperwork completeness is a pipe dream.
That is…until now. Introducing Vizzn!
Vizzn Inc. creates software for both heavy civil construction and general construction and has recently solved this riddle with its namesake software, Vizzn. Its largest user is boasting 95% -100% safety form compliance and is claiming that Vizzn has enabled this with no additional efforts.
Vizzn is a construction management software program as well as a safety program. It identifies missing safety paperwork by analyzing what is being done and equipment statuses and then compares it to the paperwork that should have been filed. Missing safety paperwork automatically triggers notifications to the appropriate people to follow up and enforce compliance. Continued non-compliance escalates the omissions to a more senior level.
Above is Vizzn’s interface for a particular site. At a glance, from the phone or computer, any Project Manager or Foreman can quickly see exactly what pieces of safety paperwork are missing. P28 is missing an Equipment Checklist because it's not turquoise. The same quick identification happens with events.
And here is the best part – No one even needs to look at this as Vizzn will automatically notify the appropriate leaders of any missing paperwork. And, if it still remains incomplete, a user can customize it to have that omission escalated to more and more senior leaders until rectified.
Borger Group of Companies, located in Calgary, Alberta, is boasting 95-100% compliance compared to 35% prior to Vizzn, and with less oversight than its previous paper systems.
To request a demo or more information, reach out to the Vizzn team at www.vizznsoftware.com or call toll free 1(833)698-4996. You will sleep better with the Vizzn construction management software program looking out for everyone on your team!