Top‌ ‌5‌ ‌Advantages‌ ‌of‌ ‌Digitizing‌ ‌Safety‌ Compliances‌

Compliance is what keeps everyone and everything… in line. Digitizing Safety Compliances plays important role in construction business.

As an owner of a construction business, your core focus and interest lie in the actual construction task. Employing workers, engineers, and other personnel, procuring necessary machinery and materials, and meticulous planning of all the involved processes – all these tasks take up the majority of your attention.

However, “compliance” should also get similar prioritization and importance, which provides structure and standardization to this diverse range of activities in your site.

Out of the long list of compliances that a construction business has to adhere to viz financial, quality control, environmental impact, etc., one of the most critical is the ‘‘Health and Safety Compliance’’.

The reason why so much prominence is attached to safety compliance is that not only would non-compliance lead to financial and reputational losses. But, in addition, it can result in loss of life!

Why Safety Compliance in the Construction Industry Matters?

The processes, materials, machinery, and locations involved at construction sites make them a dangerous place to work. As a result, multiple health and safety hazards have to be considered while running a construction business. And to monitor these measures, there are in place Health and Safety Compliances regulated by OSHA standards.

In addition, OSHA compliance can help save costs (in the form of substantial insurance premiums and legal liabilities), prevent reputation-tarnishing litigations, and build goodwill for the business.

But these compliances are often viewed as burdensome, and mainly because they are not managed well.

A TrackVia research found tech-enabled solutions can significantly improve the accuracy of construction business data, especially the ones linked to safety, quality, and efficiency.

According to the recent TrackVia survey conducted among 500 executives:

88% said that they spend 1,300 hours per year to assemble data into a usable format
65% of managers said manual processes cause misplacement of work orders
59% said that they receive incomplete data and poor quality data through manual data collection
47 % of managers still use manual systems for data collection

At Pulse, we believe that Health and safety compliances can be seamlessly and diligently managed – through the use of construction compliance checklists. And the icing on the cake is that it digitizes your entire compliance in the process.

To understand how this can benefit you, let’s look at some of the fundamental advantages of digitizing the safety compliances for construction industries.

Advantages of Digitizing Safety Compliances

These are the pure advantages of digitizing safety compliance in the construction industry:

1. Bid Adieu to the Mounting Paperwork

Gone are the days when surveys and checklists had to be filled in on physical forms. If stuck in the old ways of compliance, site managers get lost in piling paperwork, files, and folders. Not to mention the risk of physical documents getting lost, damaged, compromised, or posing a fire hazard themselves. Moreover, compliance information, once printed, is hardly kept up to date.

As opposed to this case, once digitized, all your compliance documents can be made available at one common online platform and accessed quickly by authorized personnel. Moreover, they do not carry the risk of physical damage, and their storage is scalable. So say goodbye to papers. To be able to manage compliance efficiently, going digital is the way.

With digitized construction compliance checklists, you never have to worry about lost forms, outdated checklists, or piling paperwork. If a compliance issue arises, a faster response can be given, and more efficient actions can be taken if the necessary documentation is instantaneously procured.

2. Timely Alerts for Compliance Expirations

Preventive measures always have an expiration date. Whether it is the renewing of licenses, or monitoring periodic safety inspections or even tracking the OSHA mandatory training that is due – multiple deadlines need timely notification.

If compliance is maintained in a physical format, it is challenging to keep track of and be alerted about these important dates. On the contrary, if you maintain a digital record of all the details, you get timely alerts against any upcoming deadlines, expirations, renewal dates, and best-before dates; and take appropriate actions.

3. Data Integration Benefits

With digitized safety compliance checklists, you can achieve data integration at multiple levels. E.g., integrating the digitally maintained safety compliance record with the reporting software used at the construction company to generate insightful reports. You can further combine with the HR software maintaining worker data to map compliance at the individual worker level.

Similarly, you can leverage digitization to avoid duplication of efforts and save time by easily linking the data collected for compliance with another. E.g., A lot of important data is collected at the time of completing the pre-construction risk assessment compliance. This data can in turn be utilized to establish proper operating procedures as mandated by OSHA. It can also be leveraged to provide relevant training to the impacted workers.

Overall, digitization helps coordinate and communicate between teams, management, departments, and application software.

4. Real-Time Information and Insights

Using the latest technology makes it possible to monitor the construction sites live and get real-time updates. This helps bring a bird’s eye to whether proper due diligence is being complied with at the grassroots levels. For example, monitoring whether the right PPE gear is being used by workers, ensuring all the color codes, posters, and warning signs are in place at the construction site, etc., is how you can monitor safety compliances through digital means.

Another advantage of real-time information is that swift action can be taken against any incident that may occur, and accordingly, necessary steps can be taken as directed by the standards.

5. Seamless Digitised Training

One of the most essential and effective compliance measures prescribed by OSHA is imparting worker training. Through training, workers are sensitized about the tasks they are about to perform, the machinery they are supposed to use, and the risks associated with both. Any laxity in these training programs accounts for non-compliance and can result in severe consequences – both regulatory and risk-wise.

By maintaining worker training in a digital format, workers and relevant teams can easily access them, and the attendance and completion levels can be tracked accordingly. In addition, providing training to new joiners, workers who have switched between processes, or even periodic re-enforcing training sessions can be better imparted and monitored when made available in a digital format.

Moreover, training material in digital format is easier to maintain up-to-date, thereby ensuring that all the latest compliances are covered therein.

Long Story Short

Compliance is always looked at by most as an arduous, time-consuming task. And honestly, many regulations need to be complied with, especially for the construction industry. But with the correct planning and digitized construction compliance checklists, being compliant becomes a whole lot easier.

At Pulse, we use the latest technology to manage all your safety compliances better. With our intelligent safety compliance checklists with customized templates and in-built logic, we help you navigate this due-diligence maze and emerge on the other side – safe, sound, and compliant.