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.
Having recognised Sysmax software’s universal benefits to improve performance, reduce costs and optimise value — regardless of the sector — we are now bringing the powerful, time proven benefits of our digital compliance and competency software platform to the social housing sector and are the recognised platform of choice for Direct Works.
The timing could not be better in a landscape that recognises that while progress has been made, we still have a long way to go five years on from the Hackitt Report. It’s time for the talk to stop, and action to start.
A sector under scrutiny
Now more than ever, the social housing sector is under scrutiny when it comes to compliance and competency. The Building Safety Act (BSA), which came into effect on the 1st April 2023, 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 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manuals on office shelves, multiple versions of EHS spreadsheets, intermittent supplier quality checks, simple or outdated skill matrices, are gone.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 shareholder ruin for those who fail to comply or underestimate its severity.
To know how well your organisation is performing, you can ask yourself this one simple question: How do you know right now that you have the right people doing things right? If the answer is you can’t be 100% certain that you and your organisation are protected or you’re wrestling with scalable solutions to meet the Building Safety Act compliance and competency requirements, you are not alone.
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?
By breaking compliance down into a series of steps, Sysmax 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
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. Compliance and competency, embedding 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.
To find out more about the work Sysmax is carrying out to help social housing providers click here.
Header image: ©rohane/AdobeStock
