At Priorclave, like so many other small companies, we were using old fashioned, paper based processes for completing and updating our health and safety requirements.
Needless to say carrying out tasks such as writing and updating health and safety policies along with staff hand books manually is very time consuming.Training and monitoring staff, keeping up with who has done what and when can be a near impossible task.We also have to ensure we are keeping up with the necessary certificate updates and legislation.
Previously we have used external bodies to write such documents as we lacked the time and specialist expertise needed to do it in-house but of course all this comes at a price. Now we have BCarm we have been able to completely update and modify our health and safety policy within a couple of days using the pre-written policy on the BCarm system. The policy template was easily altered to suit our company needs and any irrelevant sections removed or extras added at the click of a button.
Basic health and safety training can be hard to schedule into staff's daily schedules as it not only takes the staff member away from their daily tasks but also requires a trainer and / or extra company funds if the training is done externally. BCarm offers an E-Learning service which is not only informative but flexible too. Being a web based system we are able to not only include our onsite staff in the E-Learning plan but also our external service engineers, so we can be sure that everyone is getting the same level of training. Our staff can pick up and put down the training if they have important time sensitive tasks to complete, which benefits us as a company not only to save funds but to help each staff member stay in control of their training without being overwhelmed with a full day or two of courses to take on at once. Not only does the system supply the training but it monitors it too!
Each time your staff take an E-Learning course they will not only get a grade based on the knowledge they have seen on the video / interactive lesson but they will also have questions based on how they feel the requirements in this training session are used in your business, for example - "do you know the fire plan for your company?" Based on the answers given in this portion of the training a risk factor score is compiled, the manager of the system can then see which areas need immediate attention and the scores can be updated as and when the preventative measures / corrective actions have been put in place. This allows for easy reporting and monitoring minimising the need for corrective actions and pushing the use of preventative actions throughout the business.
Rather than spending our time hunting for paperwork and triple checking our documents, with all aspects of health and safety curated by BCARM the relevant documents are easily found and recalled from the system. We have also utilized the attachments sections for all of our procedures, photos and certificates to greatly improve our health & safety documentation.
Now that we are spending less time and money on the admin side of health and safety by using the highly automated system and avoiding the need to subcontract our policy writing or risk assessing to external bodies we can focus more time on involving our staff in the monitoring of health & safety and presenting ideas to improve our preventative measure which is creating a much better culture towards health and safety throughout Priorclave.
The appreciation we have for BCarm would not have been achieved without the team running it all, they are always there to help. Steve Williams (Managing Director) has provided me with extra knowledge along the path to fully setting up the system to ensure I utilize it fully; even a year in he is still willing to go over any areas without batting an eyelid.
Colin Hemsworth (Client Engagement) has received countless emails from me, helping me with technical problems, E-Learning questions and setting up our staff members; he is quick to respond and polite which helps us greatly when we are in time pressured situations.
Mark Hutchinson (Risk Engineering Consultant) came in to help us with setting up our risk assessments in the early days of using BCarm and it was worth every penny. Mark not only explained how the Risk Assessments are done but he set them all up on the system, went through them in the areas of Assessment to ensure they were understandable to me and even now when I email over questions I will always receive a polite and very informative response.
There is no shortage of support and features when using BCarm, we couldn't be happier with the impacts it's had on us throughout the business.
