Internal & Supply Chain Golden Thread BSA Compliance in Days
New digital platform available to help social housing providers, contractors and DLOs comply today.
Peter McAteer, CEO of Sysmax, the compliance, risk and competency software platform now deploying across housing providers and contractors, discusses scalable solutions to solve the Golden Thread and Building Safety Act compliance and competency management conundrum which the sector is currently wrestling with.
Born of involvement in some of the biggest industrial disasters in history, including Piper Alpha and Deep Water Horizon, I established Sysmax driven by a passion for, in its simplest terms, ensuring people with the right skills are in right place, doing things properly. After many years of investing to get Sysmax recognised as ‘the competency and compliance platform against which all others are judged’ in the oil and gas industry, we decided to share our software’s unparalleled benefits across other sectors. After all, whether in energy, manufacturing, farming, utilities, tourism and even on Hollywood movie sets, we need competency and compliance to keep things safe and efficient. The Grenfell tragedy resonated deeply with me due to personal loss and threat to my own and my family’s lives. I offered to be an expert witness based on two highly explosive properties I had experienced. The publication of the Hackitt Report made social housing and the construction supply chain appropriate markets for our platform.
A sector under scrutiny
We are in a landscape which recognises that even though we’re five years on from the Hackitt Report and progress has been made, we still have a long way to go. The social housing supply chain is under scrutiny now more than ever thanks to the Building Safety Act (BSA), which came into effect on the 1st of April 2023 and will have full implementation by October 2023. The BSA enforces a statutory requirement to produce and maintain a Building Safety case and report, and to instigate and maintain The Golden Thread which requires proof of competency and compliance of personnel and products, in order to keep both buildings and people safe now and in the future. The significant word here is the proof: Those responsible need to be able to demonstrate compliance with applicable building regulations and be able to evidence meeting the requirements of new building controls throughout any design, construction and – significantly for the sector – refurbishment. The days of unread manuals on office shelves, multiple versions of EHS spreadsheets, intermittent supplier quality checks, simple or outdated skill matrices, are gone. We’re entering an era of true accountability, where real cases of corporate manslaughter, fines, reputation ruin and share-holder ruin for those who fail to comply or underestimate its severity.
An efficient organisation is a safe organisation
But far from what some perceive as a big bad admin burden, or ‘health and safety gone mad’, The Golden Thread offers us all a tremendous opportunity for organisations to improve financial and operational performance. It gives the chance to raise the benchmark and get more effective and efficient by ensuring procedures and people are implemented, measured, evaluated and managed successfully. If organisations do what they are supposed to do and do it well, and this is cascaded throughout the supply chain, the improvement in efficiencies, safety and economics is staggering. After all, the flip side of risk is opportunity. And a massive opportunity here is efficiency. The Get It Right initiative has shown that the construction industry could save between £10-25 billion per annum simply by eliminating error. That’s huge.
Efficiency is a key objective for most organisations. It brings many benefits, like reduction in costs, downtime, waste, double working, errors, and risk. It can even impact on ‘softer’ things like positive culture change, more space for thinking and improved creativity. To improve quality, productivity, safety and sustainability we need to engage leadership and change attitudes.
Managing compliance and competency at scale
This may all sound great in principle. But how do you start? If you set your competency KPIs too low, they’re not effective; but too high and they demoralise the organisation. You may start off well in your competency and compliance journey, but how do know where and when standards fall short? How do you provide validation at each step, so problems don’t reveal themselves at the point of delivery, or when it’s too late? It’s often easy to manage by department or on a small scale but becomes complex when rolling it our across an entire organisation. How do you evidence, consistently, how you are compliant?
The good news is that it’s beautifully simple if you’ve got the right platform, and help is now at hand with Sysmax’s software platform.
By breaking compliance down into a series of steps, the Sysmax Benchmax software platform ensures that everyone can be on the same page when it comes to compliance and competency. This includes:
• Demonstrable progress in compliance with the Building Safety Act
• Demonstrable proof of compliance with the Golden Thread with key suppliers
• Enables upskilling and multi-skilling with always on training and competency standards in the hands of the workforce
• The core roles in social housing covered for competency compliance with common, shared metrics, across the sector
• The core technical challenges for compliance covered and shared across the sector (asbestos, sharps, working at heights etc)
• A new and far more dynamic approach to the management of risk placed in the hands of your workforce and suppliers
• Predicting where your next incident is likely to occur using our ground-breaking AI Risk Management technology
• Automatically schedules regular inspections and audits in the workplace, by your own workforce, to ensure your employees are following your business processes consistently
• Driving efficiency through ensuring the best practice you’ve invested in for many years is used, constantly, across the enterprise and you can both see and prove that it is
Best practice in competent hands
Sysmax software solutions offer ‘out of the box’ compliance with core roles and competency issues ready to go for every social housing landlord, DLO or contractor. The Sysmax apps / digital playbooks – available online and offline - literally place best practice in the hands of role specific jobs (plumbers, joiners, bricklayers, roofers, gas engineers, and electricians) and validates their use and adherence in real-time. No more searching for supplier manuals, procedures, guidelines or training information - they’re in the app and role specific. This helps to enable culture change whilst driving performance improvement across the organisation, as well as supporting online learning and opportunities for upskilling and multi-skilling operatives. Operatives can also reach out for remote support from experts and receive digital chat or video guidance to fix problems, delivering enormous efficiencies across the sector. It’s a digital see-through of compliance and competency of product and people from start to finish.
Compliance and competency, sewing The Golden Thread are themes that Sysmax is passionate about and we want to help the social housing supply chain, from RSHs, DLOs to contractors and other service providers, not only comply with the BSA, but do things right first time, every time.
Those who have used it say you won’t find a quicker, more elegant, scalable solution to Golden Thread and Building Safety Act compliance and competency management conundrum. Managing our responses to the BSA is more than adherence to regulation; it’s more than a duty of care. It means we can all sleep easier at night.
To help bring all of the above to life and to answer specific questions Housing Association magazine readers may have, we are holding a free, online webinar: Internal & Supply Chain Golden Thread BSA Compliance in Days on the 6th July 11am-12. It is suitable for everyone in the supply chain, including social housing providers, contractors and DLOs who need help to manage their response to the Building Safety Act.
The first 20 people who sign up for the webinar will get access to a free two-month trial.
Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_mgD29XLBRcy3laf8MyOxxA
If you can’t make this date but would like a free demo of the software, https://buff.ly/3Vo232p alternatively use the QR code for more information.
Images © Sysmax
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