When every construction employee has a smartphone in their pocket, going digital is a smart move for site safety and your bank balance.
The days of trying to decipher hand written notes on a coffee stained incident report may be over thanks to a number of site document applications and software packages now on the market.
By going paperless, site documentation can be quickly completed by managers, site supervisors, safety inspectors and construction workers on mobile devices. Photographs can also be used to identify risks and annotate imagery. All this information is then available to retrieve, with just a few clicks or swipes, whenever you need it.
Current products on the market include Foremanage’s “Capture, Store and Retrieve” system and a paperless safety app by Pervidi.
Benefits across the board, on site and back in the office
Going paperless is a time saver. On average, companies spend a total of 1-3 minutes handling each piece of paper related to safety. If a construction site handles 15 safety documents a day, that’s the equivalent of 125 hours a year.
There are also savings to be made in relation to the cost of paper, ink, toner and storage space, as well as the cost of rolling out updates to paper templates.
Going digital also sidesteps some of the problems of processing paperwork on site. It’s easy for paper documents to get dirty, wet, torn or completely lost, and with many safety forms crammed onto a single page, there’s often not enough room to offer a comprehensive response.
Streamlining accountability and site safety
Site documentation plays a key role in due diligence. When workers fill out paper forms, crucial fields can be accidentally missed out, where as digitised forms can include mandatory fields to ensure all the critical information is captured before submission.
As soon as a digitised document is completed the form can be seen back at the office or by personnel elsewhere on site. This means hazards or grievances can be addressed in a timely way before they escalate into incidents.
At the strategic level, the digital collection and collation of site documents can help managers assess whether safety initiatives are having a positive impact, as well as helping them identify areas where safety can be improved.