“With HandsHQ, I was able to do the set of RAMS within ten minutes. I cannot produce anything else with that speed and quality.”

Challenges

Trevor Baker is Senior Health, Safety, Environment & Quality Manager at Brown & Carroll, leading a HSEQ team of five people. He explains that prior to using HandsHQ to complete, manage and view the company’s RAMS, the team had been relying on Word documents.

This sprawling collection of files included hundreds of RAMS – which were often up to 70 pages long and some of which were very out of date.

“Some dated back to Word 97 and none of the formatting worked,” explains Trevor, “and we have five or six clients who use their own templates. It was a mess.”

In particular, the formatting of the documents was very time consuming. The quality was poor and rejections were a significant problem.

Solution

To make sense of this chaos, Trevor knew a better system was required. He began looking for RAMS software and found HandsHQ.

Trevor says, “The leadership team knew we were drowning in paperwork, so when they saw HandsHQ they were immediately sold. HandsHQ makes it so easy. And the look of the risk assessments is very good.”

Previously, RAMS had typically taken between one to three hours to produce. An inelegant process of scanning in the files and sending them to clients would often lead to RAMS being rejected as illegible.

Now, users are guided through the RAMS production process by the HandsHQ software. The simple, step-by-step guided process means RAMS can be completed in less than ten minutes.

Trevor shares the details of a recent job when he completed a set of RAMS in just 15 minutes. Instead of needing to go back to the office to produce the RAMS, he simply pulled out his phone and used HandsHQ.

“There was little risk attached, but the permit depended on a set of RAMS. I was able to do it, sign it, and send it within ten minutes. It went straight to the right person and we got the permit. I cannot produce anything else with that speed and quality with anything else I do.”

Trevor says that without HandsHQ in such a scenario, the RAMS probably wouldn’t have been received by the customer until the next day. Avoiding delays to installation work on customer sites isn’t the only benefit appreciated by customers.

Using HandsHQ, the team is able to produce great-looking RAMS documents that are highly rated by Brown & Carroll’s customers.

Trevor explains, “We can now turnaround a quality document very fast.”
The team has eliminated the earlier difficulties around formatting. This has saved a huge amount of time for the HSEQ team. The information is more clearly laid out and easier to understand. The documents look great and are accepted by clients without effort.

“When our RAMS go out to people now, it looks good, it looks fresh,” says Trevor, “they know we know our stuff; they think ‘someone’s spent some time on this’ – even if, funnily enough, it’s taking us less time!”

The new, improved process and better RAMS documentation means that RAMS are no longer regularly rejected by clients.

The time savings have transformed the work of the HSEQ team. In particular, the ease of creating templates has stood out as a real benefit. Overall, Trevor estimates that the time savings achieved equate to at least one full-time employee.

He says, “Without HandsHQ I would probably have had to employ somebody else to pick up the work. There’s no question when it comes to renewal: everyone in the business realises I either employ someone else, or two admin staff, or I have HandsHQ.”