Overview
Our client is a multi-national organization providing sophisticated componentry to the Defense Industry. They operate in an incredibly regulated sector and perform a range of high-risk work as part of the manufacturing process. It is essential they meet, ever-increasing, stringent legislative requirements, particularly in the area of Permit Issuing, Permit Tracking, and LOTO to ensure the safety of workers and compliance as a preferred supplier.
The need to more efficiently manage the highly administrative process and remain successful in such a competitive environment began their search for a digital solution.
Goals
A single cloud-based software system to manage onboarding, licenses, and insurances for 3PL contractors.
An easy-to-access and easy-to-use portal /interface for end-users, including full mobile functionality to manage Work Orders, and related safety compliance activities in the one place.
Electronic High-Risk Work Management, Work Permitting, and Safety Management.
Comprehensive, real-time reporting.
Clear, ‘traffic light’ system to provide a visual indication of compliance to legislation and the internal compliance framework.
Visibility of non-conformance and improvement opportunities.
Proactive, automated process review and improve workflow.
Outcome
Our client started this project with 3 top priorities.
- Rapid Deployment
- Smart Integration
- Process Improvement through digital
To focus immediately on Rapid Deployment, the Beakon team worked hard to identify those elements of the platform that could be deployed straight ‘Out of the Box’.
Supporting our client further, we instigated our six-week rapid implementation plan including a design and process workshop. Beakon delivers ‘Out of the Box’ best practice as an ISO-compliant framework, and our client elected to initially use Beakon with minimal customizations, deploying the system to a live environment and making changes as required to ensure rapid deployment.
Even in its OOTB form, Beakon manages contractor compliance and high-risk permit to work requirements, with a user-friendly interface supported by a large ‘Knowledge Base’ of ‘How to Guides’.
The second priority was successfully interfacing with IBM Maximo to take the guesswork out of the Work Order allocation process. Using ‘AI’, Beakon provided ‘real-time’ best-matched contractors based on compliance, qualifications, and ratings.
Beakon further improved the process, by designing and deploying automatic identification of Maximo Work Orders that require any High-Risk permits to be issued, based on the Work Order content itself. This automated a critical control point in their Health and Safety workflow.
As the business embraced the new Beakon system we further developed the capability with a robust, clear, simple to use interface with Maximo. This proved to be highly successful, taking the implementation from useful to truly value-adding.
The successful six-week rapid implementation met all 3 priorities, including the important stage of improving process through the digital deployment. The Beakon system helped our client identify parts of their process which could be automated, streamlined and/or removed.
Conclusion
Our client had a very tight timeframe to implement the Beakon system.
Whilst the implementation timeline was a challenge, it was important to get the fundamentals right, and adopt a staged approach which meant using most functionality ‘Out of the Box’.
Fortuitously, Beakon’s off-the-shelf framework is ISO-based and very robust and in the end, our client found this more than met their base-level requirements.
Clear communication on goals meant Beakon was able to deliver beyond initial expectations, providing automated workflows and optimizing an existing asset (Maximo) through a best practice interface.
With Beakon doing all the heavy lifting to ensure only compliant (licensed, insured, trained, capable) contractors can be allocated to a Work Order, together with driving the safety process with automatic creation of Electronic Permits to Work for high-risk activities it was a highly successful project.
Chunk your project into phases Simplify process steps Streamline and standardize Embrace the opportunity to automate
To see a demonstration of the Beakon platform or hear more about this project, please contact us, we would be happy to hear from you.