Overview
CHEP manages, maintains, transports, and supplies more than 300 million platforms for our customers. Their higher-quality pallets, containers, RPCs, bins, trays, and store displays support the construction, handling, and transport of more efficient and sustainable product loads. CHEP platforms and services play a critical role within every leg and across every trading partner in the supply chain.
Challenges
Sourcing an electronic Permit to Work system that could manage all of the complex aspects associated with high-risk work, including approval processes, legislative requirements across multiple territories, and identified risk management through the Job Safety Analysis.
The system also needed to clearly drive isolation and shutdown processes where applicable.
Goals
- A single cloud-based software system to manage JSA, permit planning, licenses, and insurance where required.
- An easy-to-access and easy-to-use portal/interface for end users, including full mobile functionality.
- High-Risk Work Management, Work Permitting, and Safety Management.
- Clear Isolation and Shutdown workflow including approval gates.
- Comprehensive, real-time reporting.
- Clear, ‘traffic light’ system to provide a visual indication of compliance with legislation and CHEP’s compliance framework.
Outcome
Conscious that Beakon delivers OOTB best practices as an ISO-compliant framework, CHEP elected to initially use Beakon with minimal customizations, deploying the Permit to Work system to a live environment and making changes as required;
Beakon’s electronic Permit to Work module provided a time-saving asset, with a user-friendly interface and audit-ready reporting for CHEP
CHEP gained true visibility of high-risk work being conducted across all sites and allowed for sharing of best practices across the business, rather than ongoing duplication of standard documentation.
Ultimately the project gave CHEP a level of comfort that High-Risk workflows were being automatically driven through the Beakon digital platform. This allowed their leadership team to focus on managing the job rather than the administration and it continues to drive process improvement and a strong focus on safety.
The embedded process flow has now become standard practice and routine across the CHEP business.
Conclusion
Whilst the implementation timeline for CHEP was a challenge, it was important to get the fundamentals right, and adopt a staged approach which meant most functionality was initially deployed ‘Out of the Box’.
Fortuitously, Beakon’s off-the-shelf framework is ISO-based and very robust, and in the end, met CHEPS base-level requirements.
This approach no doubt added to the successful outcome, giving CHEP time to continuously improve their internal process and then refine and tailor the Beakon workflow to suit.
We strongly recommend upfront workshops with key stakeholders to truly understand ‘real life’ examples of ‘pain points’ and shared experiences prior to implementation. Beakon’s experience across industries and regions was invaluable during that process and provided CHEP with best-practice solutions during the planning phase.
In a nutshell, keep it simple and take advantage of the depth of experience that the Beakon team can offer as part of the implementation service.