Safety Management is a big deal, and the best safety practices translate into a competitive advantage. If your company reduces on-the-job injuries, you can reduce your insurance rate. Fewer injuries means fewer worker compensation claims which means lower premiums. Lower premiums make you more attractive to hiring firms, as the cost of your insurance premium increases are passed on to your clients in the form of increased bids for work.
Much of this has to do with the insurance industry's use of an Experience Modification Rate (EMR). The more on-the-job injuries you have, the higher your EMR, the higher your insurance premiums. An EMR of 1 is the industry average and even an increase to 1.2 could translate into a 20% higher premium, costing thousands of additional dollars. These higher premium dollars have to be passed along to the customer for you to stay profitable. Your customers know this too and, in the construction industry, some are even pre-qualifying companies based on their EMR before accepting bids.
Bright Software has experience in building the technology behind common safety practices which will allow you to lower on-the-job injuries. For example, one oil rig customer was already using DoForms to collect daily safety form information from their employees. Field oil rig workers would use tablets or phones to enter information in DoForms, but it was proving too cumbersome to export the data into Excel to sort and figure out who filled out what in a timely manner. It would take one employee all day to produce one safety report in an easy-to-read format.
Instead, we worked to integrate the DoForms safety information into a database to automatically provide custom reporting functions. Now, Safety Reports arrive as PDFs in everyone’s inboxes every morning. Every oil rig manager can see what hazards to avoid by learning what happened on someone else’s oil rig and everyone must sign the form with a digital signature stating they saw the report. Should an accident happen, managers can also take pictures of the problem area, like a brake mechanism, and document injuries, showing the resultant pinched thumb, and submit those with their report.
Business owners feels better knowing that their employees are safer and that managers are aware of new or repeated safety incidents that may require procedural changes. Plus, they have reliable, timely reports that also serve as an audit trail for insurance companies. Fewer injuries can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in insurance premiums and improve your competitiveness.
If you are interested in what Bright Software can do to help you improve your safety inspections, please get in touch.