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Building The Case For Health And Safety Software by Matt Duckhouse
In the current economic climate, with budgets tightening and spending being curtailed, it is vitally important for people who are looking to invest in health,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], safety and environmental management software to be able to fully articulate the business case for the system. They also need to be able to demonstrate the likely return on investment.
There are real financial benefits of putting a safety software system in place and these need to be fully explained to budget holders in order for them to make informed decisions.
Why use software systems?
Within the heavily regulated and constantly changing health and safety arena, more and more organisations are looking to technology to assist them with the measurement of their safety, health and environmental performance and the effective implementation of their policies and procedures.
Software systems can be used to improve collaboration across an organisation as they allow for information and best practice to be shared across the entire business. They also allow for standard processes and approaches to be implemented and improve the collation and reporting of information from numerous locations.
Software can do much to assist safety managers in prioritising and delegating required actions and can help drive down the cost of operations in a number of other ways.
Building the Business Case
If you are looking to purchase a software system you will probably need to put together a business case to present to the budget holders or, if you are the budget holder, other stakeholders within your organisation. There are a number of key elements to creating a successful business case.
The document should contain:
? a brief overview of the current situation detailing the issues and costs;
? the expected business benefits from implementing the software system;
And
? details of the expected return on investment broken down and backed up with specific evidence and values. The return on investment is the area that most people struggle with. Software systems significantly improve the management of health and safety Software can drive down the business costs of implementing safety procedures.
Many companies are moving to software-based systems to help them manage their health, safety and environmental policies and processes, but safety managers may struggle to get board agreement for these in the current economic climate. Matt Duckhouse, a director of Rivo Software, explains the safety and business benefits of HS&E software,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and how to successfully argue for its introduction.
Safety Management an organisation.
However, there is a feeling that better health and safety management does not have a financial benefit. This is not true. Some of the benefits may be difficult to quantify but others are easily identified and a value can be put on them.
Quantifying the benefits
When developing your business case you should consider the following areas of financial return:
Insurance premiums: If you are a 17-year-old driving a Porsche you expect to pay high insurance premiums.
Similarly, if insurance companies view your organisation as high risk, then your premiums will be high. Simply installing H&S compliance software can help you to demonstrate to your insurance company or broker a commitment to risk reduction.
By using the software to collate and produce reports around key performance indicators you will be able to demonstrate health and safety performance improvements. Insurance companies view this as de-risking the business for them and may therefore reduce premiums.
In fact, some organisations are able to see a rapid (six months to a year), return on investment purely from this approach, let alone the other benefits that software can bring, such as reduced safety administration. To get specific values for the savings in this area you will need to approach your insurance company or broker directly and explain to them how you see the software system reducing your insured risk and how you intend to demonstrate this to them after a period of time.
Reduction in accidents and their associated claims and legal costs: In general,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], reduced accident rates within an organisation come from a number of different factors, including:
? proper monitoring of warning signs �C near misses and hazards, for example;
? ensuring that corrective actions are carried out quickly and completed satisfactorily;
? access to accurate and up-to-date information so that trends can be spotted;
? routine audits and inspections;
? ensuring people are properly trained;
? good transfer of best practice knowledge across the organisation.
Safety management software can play a key role in supporting all of these objectives, especially when it comes to bringing together information from disparate parts of an organisation and presenting it in a form that allows people to take action. For example,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], software can allow you to maintain a training matrix making it easy to identify people who are not fully trained for their role. It can also be used to manage a schedule of audits and inspections and ensure that these are completed and the resulting actions are completed to a satisfactory standard.
If you have had any compensation claims for work-related injury or ill health in the last 12 months you should try and put an average value on each of the claims and estimate how using a software system might reduce both the number of these claims and the value of them. The reduction of claim value is just as important as the reduction in the number of claims. Software can ensure that you have all the nformation that you require to properly contest a claim and can lead to a considerable drop in average claim values. Having documented proof that an individual was properly trained and that an activity was properly risk assessed at the time of an accident can also go a long way to demonstrating that your organisation Software can create reports showing improved safety performance, which may help firms win lower insurance premiums.
��Software can assist safety managers in prioritising and delegating required actions��
This is exactly what you should expect from a software system �C an auditable set of up-to-date risk assessments and clear training records demonstrating that people are trained with the skills appropriate to their roles.
Reduction in energy usage: Most organisations understand the need to reduce their energy usage and therefore their carbon emissions. The recent focus in this area also has some clear financial benefits �C energy is expensive and reducing usage clearly reduces costs. In order to make these reductions, an organisation needs to have good visibility over all aspects of energy usage. Software systems are ideal for collating this information and allowing people to make smart decisions about where reductions are possible. Often energy usage information can be obtained electronically from monitoring systems and fed in a standard format into a software system, which can then present the information in a meaningful way. This should allow you to highlight high usage areas, peak energy times and possible areas for improvement. If you could obtain a 10 per cent reduction in energy usage (an achievable target in most cases), that��s almost certainly a considerable cost saving.
Operational efficiency: Software is a very useful tool for improving operational efficiency. It can reduce duplication of effort by providing access to work already done by other people within the organisation. This might include making COSHH substance assessments or general risk assessments �C which have already been carefully considered and prepared �C available electronically as a starting point for new assessments. From a training perspective, software allows you to efficiently manage health and safety training requirements based on roles and responsibilities. In this way, you can ensure that staff training levels are upto-date, and that training is performed in the most economic way �C for instance, by ensuring that courses are attended by the right people and that they are full. Software can also automate processes that are currently done manually �C for example, collating accident data from spreadsheets or chasing up incomplete corrective actions. It also means that you can implement processes that are simply not possible with a manual system. For example, it allows you to quickly send an email at the start of each week to people who have not yet completed corrective actions without having to check or interrogate paper records �C or even having to try to remember what needs to be done. This improvement in operational efficiency may mean that you are able to reduce headcount but it is more likely that it simply releases people from administrative work and allows them to focus on solving safety issues. Competitive advantage: Operational efficiency will clearly help keep the cost of doing business low but there are other competitive advantages to being able to demonstrate that your company is pro-actively managing health, safety and environmental issues.
Organisations, especially larger ones and those in the public sector, are more likely to buy from you if your organisation has a good safety and environmental record. They don��t want to be associated with companies that might damage their own reputation and a good record says something significant about a company��s ethos. For its part, software can help to provide the information required for tenders or supporting documentation when bidding for work. It can also provide an easy way for you to supply health and safety performance information to a client. Being able to provide real-time safety information to a client during a contract might give your organisation a competitive edge when bidding for business.
Other considerations
The above points are examples of common business benefits that should be considered when drawing up your business case for safety software. They are not an exhaustive list and each organisation will have its own specific requirements that should be considered and included. Remember, the objective is to present an argument that makes the buying decision an easy one for a budget holder to make. You may want to engage a specialist software company to help you to put together your business case. They will have experience of similar organisations and of successful implementations and will be able to work with you to identify benefits. What��s more, when you start implementing your system, both sides will have a clear view of your objectives.
Conclusion
Software systems can help organisations to achieve benefits that are simply not possible with paper-based or spreadsheet-type solutions. Whilst not all the benefits of a software system are easily quantifiable, some have a potentially significant financial impact. In order for the purchase of a health, safety and environmental software system to be approved in the current economic environment, it is important that all the business benefits of the system are clearly identified and that the return on investment is apparent. Rivo Software is a leading provider of web-based risk management software. For more details, visit [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] rivo. co. uk Software allows you to ensure that employee safety training is up-to-date
http: //www. rivosoftware. com
Article taken from the March edition of Safety Management Magazine.
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