Most businesses today take a traditional approach when undertaking identification of safety-related risk in the workplace. It is not uncommon for very similar critical risks being identified, think Manual Tasking, Hazardous Substances, Fatigue Management. There is no question that these are all important and highly impactful risk areas, however, has your organisation identified what is arguably the ticking timebomb of all risks, Contractor Management?

The Situation

Today, your business, the Principal, the PCBU, must ensure that the safety practices of contractors under your direction, or working on your site, are not only living up to your businesses expectations but are also complying with relevant statutory obligations. Traditionally, a business would employ a prequalification assessment to establish the safety "credibility" of contractors before engagement. Prequalification is generally at a financial cost to the contractor and effectively only providing you with a snapshot in time of the contractor's basic safety hygiene. Further to this, some larger businesses may undertake the prequalification internally, sapping time and resources. In both scenarios, the benefit to the contractor is minimal as a basic compliance requirement to secure their contract for services.

The Risk

There are many risks of a traditional approach to prequalification, these include;

• The Prequalification process itself, is it aligned to a standard or at best an internal predetermined set of requirements?
• A snapshot in time view of some basic safety requirements of a contractor telling you very little about the contractor's actual safety maturity and continuous improvement pathway?
• The expense to the contractor receiving limited value in return, apart from basic compliance while the Principal incurs time and resource cost.
• Limited or no visibility of prequalification results … a pass/fail, binary equation with no insights on where to improve safety outcomes?
• Being confident and assured that prequalification is being reviewed by a qualified and experienced Occupational Health Professionals.
• The existence of multiple prequalifications schemes adding further cost to the contracting business.

The Solution?

With some 4500+ businesses in New Zealand on the SAFE365 platform, it took no convincing to develop QUALIFY365, an integrated prequalification solution that addresses the shortcomings of traditional offerings.

• A Prequalification aligned to the principles of Construction Health And Safety New Zealand (CHASNZ) and PAS 91:2017 Construction Prequalification Questionnaires.
• A prequalification that not only assesses against the requirements but then encourages participants to improve their score over time and links back to the SAFE365 safety maturity product enabling businesses to improve their safety capability, culture, performance and engagement over time aligned to the higher principles of ISO 45001:2018 Safety Management Systems
• A prequalification that is reviewed and audited by degree qualified and industry certified safety professionals.
• A prequalification that once completed can be utilised between thousands of participants in the SAFE365 family and part of a data lake for Principals to access subject to the contractor's approval.

For the cost of a traditional prequalification scheme, not only can your business now undertake a prequalification based on an industry-standard, it can also have a sophisticated Safety Management tool at its disposal. A tool to continuously improve organisational safety, benchmark to others in our industry and of course gain access to the trusted advice and support of a network of local safety professionals.

Can we help your contracting chain?

Safe365 works with businesses to achieve occupational health and safety success. Read more about our work here.