The current regulatory environment is making it increasingly important for organisations to properly manage risks, especially Health and Safety policy and procedures. For larger organisations, the job of co-ordinating the activities of numerous people across multiple locations can be particularly complex.
This article looks at the benefits a software system can bring to the management of Health and Safety, with a particular focus on larger organisations. It also describes some of the steps you should be taking when assessing, selecting and then rolling out a software package.
What benefits can you expect from a software system?
Many of the benefits of a software application stem from the fact that all Health and Safety information is being collected and held in one location. This makes it much easier to report on that data, to track activity and to make information available across the whole organisation. This visibility is critical in identifying trends, patterns and potential problem areas which is in turn vital to putting in place activities to improve compliance.
A centralised system also allows standard procedures to be implemented across all users of the system. This standardisation is the key to ensuring that best practice is being adhered to and that process improvements can be quickly rolled out across an organisation.
What types of Health & Safety software systems are available?
Software systems range in functionality and cost, from single user systems that can be installed on a PC to ‘enterprise’ systems designed to manage multiple users. Single user systems can be helpful to smaller organisations but the real benefits of a software system become apparent when multiple users are able to access a single system.
There are two main types of enterprise software – ones that are installed onto PCs within your organisation and ones that operate over the Internet and are hosted by the supplier. Internet based systems have the following key advantages:
- They are accessible everywhere in your organisation without the need to install software
- They are always up-to-date – there is no need to roll-out upgrades
- They remove the maintenance overhead from your internal IT teams
- There is no need to buy hardware keeping initial costs lower
For these reasons, web-based systems are the preference for most organisations.
How to assess whether a software supplier and their products are appropriate for you
Choosing the right software system and supplier for your organisation can be difficult and time consuming but it is essential to make the right choice if you are to gain maximum benefit from the system. The following are 6 typical steps in any successful selection process:
Step 1: Identification of Business Needs
The first step in the selection process is to define your goals and objectives. To ensure that you capture all your requirements, you should identify and involve key people at all levels of your organisation. These people could also form a decision making team who can be involved in meeting suppliers and evaluating options.
Your goals and objectives might involve the resolution of existing problems, for example, ensuring that all accidents are recorded and investigated or reducing the amount of time taken to produce reports.
At the end of this step you should have a clear set of business objectives and you should be able to identify which are ones are most important. It is often useful at this stage to put together a cost benefit analysis. Look at potential savings in time and duplicated effort. Often these savings can justify the cost of a system before the ‘softer’ benefits of visibility and control of risks are taken into account.
Step 2: Determining your requirements
Step 2 looks at what a system would need to do in order to meet your business needs. Linking product features to your business needs can be difficult to do and it is often worth asking suppliers about how they have implemented their system into similar organisations.
You should also consider the wider features of a system that will be important for instance; usability – how easy does the system need to be for the target users; technology – is it important for the supplier to have a similar technology platform to your organisations?
Finally, you need to consider what you will require from a potential supplier for example, the service levels they can provide and their future product plans.
Step 3: Evaluating options
In some organisations this step may involve a formal tender process. In others it may simply involve identifying potential suppliers and inviting them to discuss your requirements. In either case you will need to identify suppliers by searching the web and reading through the trade press.
Each of the potential suppliers should be provided with your requirements document and asked to demonstrate how their products might meet your needs.
You might want to use a scorecard and weight your requirements so that those that are most important to you are scored higher than those that are less important.
Step 4: Final selection
Once you have decided on a potential supplier you should perform some due diligence. Typically, this will involve getting references from existing clients, performing financial checks, asking about backup processes and disaster recovery plans and obtaining escrow agreements.
References can take the form of site visits or telephone calls with existing clients. Often telephone calls can allow the client to speak freely about their experience with the supplier. Bear in mind that normally the supplier accompanies the client to site visits so the client may feel less able to openly discuss problems.
If your supplier will be hosting the software for you and holding your data you will need to ensure that you are happy with their backup process and disaster recovery procedures. Escrow agreements allow you to take the software and continue to operate it if the supplier goes out of business and should be considered as a potential way to reduce risk.
Step 5: Implementation and training
Once a supplier has been selected you should determine how you will roll out the software across your organisation. For all but the smallest implementations you should consider running a pilot at a small number of selected sites. This process can be very useful in flushing out problems before the system is installed.
A phased roll-out is another way of reducing the likelihood of implementation problems. A phased roll-out might be done by implementing the whole system across a group of sites and then bringing more sites on as time goes by. Alternatively, you might want to roll out to all sites but phase the modules that are being used.
Step 6: Post-implementation
Once the system is implemented there should be time set aside for a review of how successful the project has been when compared with the original goals and objectives. Part of this review should be setting out the key objectives for the next quarter, 6 months etc and looking at how these will be measured. You should involve your supplier in these discussions and ask them for suggestions and help in meeting your objectives. This process of setting objectives and regularly reviewing your progress against those objectives should be ongoing.
Conclusion
Software systems can be hugely beneficial to larger organisations in allowing them to get control and visibility that is not possible with paper-based systems or Excel documents. With careful planning, buying and implementing a system that has a significant positive impact on your organisation can be easily achieved.
About the author
Matt Duckhouse is a director and co-founder of Rivo Software, a UK-based Safety, Health & Environmental software provider. You can contact him at matt.duckhouse@rivo.co.uk or via the company’s web site at: www.rivo.co.uk
