While doing my usual reading of safety related software this evening, I couldn’t help but notice the amount of discussions on forums and on blogs looking for safety data or safety related management tools in Excel format. Have we not moved beyond Excel? Don’t get me wrong Excel can be a powerful tool, but at the end of the day it’s a spreadsheet. It’s a human resource heavy application, it requires manual entry, manual updating, the logic processing is limited and reporting can be even more limiting.

When are companies going to start looking at the Excel sheet and say, “We can do better, we deserve better”. There are many companies out there building systems to manage, and they do just that, they manage. Less administration = more productive staff. The safety industry is an administration heavy industry, we all know it and we have to accept it, but the way we look at safety employees needs to change. A safety officer sitting in an office doing paperwork is not going to spot the hazard in the work place before it becomes an accident. Safety Officers need to spend more time on the ground and not in an office, in my opinion anyway.

While working directly in the safety industry I always had a running joke with my clients, the day they saw me in a suit there was trouble. Let’s get out of the office and get back to the job at hand. Bring the paperwork into the field. This is one of the main reasons we are going to the lengths we are with RFID and handheld technology. We believe this technology will greatly reduce the administration time required to provide a greater level of reporting, superseding most current best practices for less effort, less cost and even better, allow more work be done from field level, where the primary activity of the company is taking place.

Over the next month or so we are going to outline our full system here on www.cgasoftware.com and we should have a full live demo active before the end of the year. However to see the full strengths of our system it will have to be seen to be appreciated and we will be more than happy to demo it. If your interested in finding out more about where we see the future of safety management systems sign up to our mailing list or drop us a mail and we’ll put you on the priority list for when the product hits the market in January.

George

About the Author – George Curley