Overview
Our client, a large national manufacturing company with 16 major manufacturing facilities, together with several warehouses is a 24/7 operation that performs high levels of Permit to Work and High-Risk jobs across its production lines. Management and maintenance of a facilities group this large, including high volumes of preventative maintenance, breakdown down, and services infrastructure, involves an arsenal of trade workers moving in and out of the premises daily.
Safety management of work which requires a permit or high-risk permitting was highly administrative, complex and inconsistent with risks identified during internal audit processes.
Our client identified a need and began the process of sourcing a robust, highly visual, and easy-to-use tool that could provide confidence that all permitted work, high-risk work, and isolation work was easily managed, and provided site risk and conflict insights.
As the first choice for managing compliance, reducing risk, and improving safety Beakon was selected to implement Permit to Work, High-Risk Work, and Isolation Register modules in a phased integration project.
Implementation Strategy
The Manufacturing business had a tight timeframe to implement the Beakon system and so the implementation strategy was formulated to accommodate this.
Whilst the implementation timeline was a challenge, it was important to get the fundamentals right, so we adopted a staged approach using most functionality straight ‘Out of the Box’. Beakon’s off-the-shelf framework is ISO-based which not only met the base-level requirements it exceeds expectations.
We began with a smaller ‘pilot’ site with dedicated resources to finalize master configuration, automated workflows, and integrations. This gave the team all the operational insight required to successfully implement Beakon in readiness to easily scale across all sites with confidence.
Goals
Implement Beakon, a single cloud-based software system to manage Permit to Work, High-Risk Work, and an Isolation Register. An easy-to-access and easy-to-use portal/interface for end-users, including full mobile functionality and the ability to manage workers’ sign-in/out of the permits all in one place, with ‘zero touches’.
- Comprehensive, real-time reporting.
- Clear, ‘traffic light’ system to provide a visual indication of compliance to legislation and compliance to their own Health and Safety framework.
- Permit to Work access management
- Energy Isolation and authorization management
- Extensive traceability to monitor requirements
- Genuine process improvement through automated workflows
Results
The project was delivered on time, in full, and within budget with some additional and unexpected benefits including positive feedback from a wide range of contracting companies and workers who expressed their appreciation at being empowered to manage their own permit activities, which ultimately increased speed to compliance and work readiness with the Beakon Platform.
A highly manual excel system became obsolete and was made redundant saving administration time.
Headcount reduction for compliance and permit-related activities is estimated at 4 FTEs across the manufacturing business, which, together with real-time visibility and reporting functionality, has developed a ‘best practice’ protocol for Manufacturing Environments, all while meeting ISO, Legislative, and internal compliance requirements.
Traceability and instant reporting through Beakon now provide rich data insights to support budgeting, business planning, and workforce management practices.