Background:

Safety Plus Inc was founded in 1991, with the concept of providing high quality loss control that concentrates on reducing a company’s risk. Safety Plus efficiently solves safety, compliance and loss control issues for companies regardless of their tolerances for risk. Founded and based in Mobile, Alabama, Safety Plus currently manages all aspects of safety, health, and environmental issues for over 150 client firms from three offices across the U.S. Clients served are a variety of government and commercial contractors in the industrial and manufacturing sectors. By focusing on all aspects of loss control for a large number of clients, Safety Plus is able to generate efficiencies not possible with employee driven programs. Safety Plus’s solutions excel in creating effective loss control programs that are financially feasible for small and large enterprises alike. Safety Plus recovers lost money by assisting with OSHA, USDOT, MSHA, and EPA compliance, as well as insurance management and employee training. As third party administrators, Safety Plus delivers an aggressive brand of risk management that generates good returns on investments and reduces employee related risks.

Business Need:

Safety Plus averaged double digit revenue growth rates across the last 3 years. That growth led to strains on labor capacity and highlighted the need for process controls. The first issue is one of scale; a healthy growth in the overall number of customers increased the volume of customer deliverables.  This created a pressure to expand labor capacity in order to maintain timely and accurate customer service. Maximizing labor efficiencies, both to optimize the output of their existing highly skilled resources and to free up time for them to properly train new resources, became an obvious strategic target for Safety Plus. The second issue was the concurrent rapid evolution of regulations faced by Safety Plus’ customers. Those Government regulations increased in both volume and complexity each year. Most of these regulations are deadline driven and require consistently accurate and timely delivery of information to various government agencies and regulatory bodies in order to avoid costly penalties. Recognizing the need and opportunity set before them, Safety Plus set out to find a web based task management solution to enable them to manage consistent task delivery for customers as they scaled up, minimize labor costs as work volumes increased, support continued sustainable growth, and enhance profitability.

The Solution:

Safety Plus completed the entire software selection process and a successful implementation effort in two months.  The HighGear task management and workflow system was quickly placed into production and rapidly adopted by all employees. Subsequently, Safety Plus also made their HighGear installation accessible to their clients to allow those clients to see and track the progress of their deliverables in real time. The HighGear project managment solution now manages 100% of customer requests and tasks.  Two thirds of those tasks are recurring activities which have been pre-defined in HighGear software to enable better planning and simpler administration. A significant portion of the remaining tasks managed in HighGear are related to case management, conducting accident investigations involving employee injuries or equipment damage for Safety Plus customers. Data collected during the investigation is utilized for legal and insurance reporting. During the implementation phase, Safety Plus completed an analysis of their existing businesses processes and evaluated how to use HighGear to optimize a variety of tasks and workflow processes.  Many of the existing processes were being managed through paper-based forms which were labor intensive and difficult to manage or track.  These forms were converted into electronic forms in HighGear software to create a fully automated digital process with increased visibility and metrics.  Processes deemed to be recurring were pre-defined for auto-generation and flow to ensure a title=”compliance” href=”https://www.highgear.com/new-product-tour/compliance-management-software-features.html”>compliance and timely delivery. Safety Plus has been able to exercise a high degree of control over how the artifacts, ownership and assignment of the tasks within a business process flow through the organization by leveraging HighGear’s deeply customizable forms, fields, statuses, and workflow rules. This dynamic agility was critical to Safety Plus because of the wide and changing scope of activities they must complete in order to support their clients. Many of their processes change frequently as government regulations change, and different clients may be impacted in different ways thereby becoming liable for varying deliverables within otherwise similar guidelines.  The agility provided by HighGear has allowed Safety Plus to deliver highly tailored and highly automated solutions to their clients in keeping with, and even ahead of, the mandated pace of change – all within cohesive and standardized methodology.

The Results:

Since the deployment of HighGear for the Safety Plus operations department, all of the expected and many ancillary benefits have been realized. By converting paper based processes into an automated solution, the employee resource pool was optimized and allows Safety Plus to take on more work without the need to increase staffing levels as previously expected. Additionally, employees who are now operating more efficiently are able to take on responsibilities previously performed only by senior management. This allows senior management to spend more time developing new products and services designed to further expand the business and increase profitability. As a service company, Safety Plus performs numerous periodic recurring tasks for each customer throughout the year, with a total of more than 5,000 recurring projects per year. Their previous paper and email based system of assignment only captured 25% of the performance data needed to demonstrate successful performance to the customer. With HighGear’s dynamic web based forms and strong internal auditing, 100% of all activities are now recorded as they occur. HighGear stores all of the details of these records, and their artifacts (documents, pictures, scans, etc.), to be permanently memorialized in a centralized database. Performance review meetings with clients now include empirical metrics and detailed information about service activities that validate and differentiate the value that Safety Plus provides to their clients. Without this data, clients historically sought to reduce their spending or competitively seek out alternate vendors. HighGear has provided a competitive advantage to Safety Plus through this visible performance data and delivered additional benefit to their clients who can now rest assured that their regulatory compliance is in good hands. HighGear’s task management system has provided Safety Plus employees and managers with real-time access to the status and details of client related tasks, from anywhere, using a web browser or mobile device. This ensures that critical items do not slip through the cracks and that all deliverables are completed on time. Furthermore, Safety Plus’ decision to configure HighGear so that their customers can log into the system and see the status of their projects and tasks from start to finish has been well received by clients, which gives Safety Plus yet another competitive advantage. After resolving many of the initially identified business needs, Safety Plus expanded their HighGear deployment, tapping HighGear to also manage sales lead tracking and billing functions. Those departments are now enjoying productivity boosts similar to those experienced by the operations team. Amy Stephenson, Operations Manager at Safety Plus said, reflecting on their HighGear choice and implementation, “Utilizing HighGear was the only way we were able to continue to meet our business challenges and continue to grow the company”. For more information, please contact sales@HighGear.com