Managing the safety of your staff and subcontractors

How do you ensure the safety of your subcontractors and integrate them into the rest of your service organisation when many firms employ hundreds of ‘subbies’ each year, with many working from remote locations far away from head office?

If your business is to provide subcontractors to support mining production or telecommunication network updates (think NBN), or to manage the maintenance of Australian firms’ fire and safety equipment, you’ll want to ensure you are delivering a competitive and quality service, while complying with industry health, safety and environment (HSE) requirements.

While this sounds pretty straightforward, it is actually very complex, particularly when you consider the challenges of identifying and briefing specialist maintenance contractors for jobs as far afield as Cobar in western New South Wales and the Pilbara in the north of Western Australia, and for network repairs in metropolitan cities. Not only do you have different legislative requirements for each of these jobs, every site and industry sector has different safety and compliance requirements.

If you are a user of contracted engineering services, you’ll want to know that the staff you use have been properly briefed and operate at the highest safety levels while on-site, so that you are not exposed to the risk of accidents or injuries resulting from subcontractors not complying with your HSE procedures.

Consider the challenges of ensuring each of your subbies has completed and complies with site and customer-specific safety briefings before going on-site. It is not possible to create a HSE management plan that fits all situations for your staff. Many of your customers will have already created their own HSE manuals and policies, which everyone on-site is expected to follow.

One way of addressing this challenge is to find a system where you can capture a skills matrix of your engineering staff, record who has been inducted for each location (where you may perform services) and even digitise any documents that you know are required by the customer in question.

This is information that makes you money, because before your team schedules engineers to go on-site and fix things, your assignment rules have intelligently processed who is actually qualified to do the job, and happens to be on today’s roster. And when he or she gets there, they have a complete set of digital forms ready for use to close out the work order and capture everything needed to make the invoice valid.

Another opportunity is to take advantage of the knowledge sharing and collaboration capabilities of cloud and mobile applications. This is particularly true of applications that are native on the Salesforce.com platform, like ServiceMax.

This is because these integrated service solutions empower firms, like yours, to ensure the information your subcontractors need is at their fingertips, anytime and anywhere they need it. So if you provide services to a number of retail stores in metropolitan Melbourne, say, you can be sure that your subcontractors have safety procedures for every site. And, a complete rundown of the customer’s service history by site and by product, as well as details of the contract entitlements and response times set in your service level agreements for this customer.

Taking an integrated, end-to-end approach to delivering contracted services also means your organisation can more tightly integrate your service offer to the specific safety requirements of your customers’ businesses and sites, making it much harder for your customer to go elsewhere for these services.

Using the social and collaboration features of products like ServiceMax for Mobile, you can also capture and share a lot of informal knowledge from your and your customers’ subject matter experts - information that is often not contained in any formal documentation but is invaluable to delivering service excellence, each and every time your subcontractors are on-site.

For example, when your subbie visits large commercial premises on a scheduled fire inspection visit, the relevant inventory may be scattered across an entire campus of offices.

With the best will in the world, it may be difficult to capture all of the inventory and its exact location in a structured way, particularly if you are servicing parts that your firm had no role in selling.

It’s valuable in this instance to be able to take photographs and provide conversational narrative to educate the next subbie that visits one quarter from now. Better still if he can direct the conversation thread to your estimator back at head office, who can pull up the images and the narrative to make some quotations.

If you are buying a field service platform, make sure you consider your network of subcontractors and find a solution that provides authenticated but appropriately limited access to your software so that it doesn’t feel like your work orders go into an invisible black box once they cross your firewall. Australia is a big country, the use of subcontractors is essential, but it doesn’t have to mean you cannot still measure your business and track compliance.

*Clive Roberts is the Managing Director and founder of Sydney-based ProQuest Consulting, a Platinum Partner for Salesforce.com and a strategic implementation partner for ServiceMax, a comprehensive solution for field service management.

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