Industry: Cleaning
Locations: Galway
Employees: 325+
Introduction:
SSE has specialised knowledge and expertise in managing Cleanroom Environments. The experienced team is fully trained to ISO9001:2015 and ICEB international standards, bringing an optimum service.
“Flex has automated the way we captured information, now we use NFC technology to carry out inspections, capture time and attendance and easily assign equipment. Flex streamlined our operation across facilities, reducing likelihood of errors and saving time.”
SSE has multiple facilities that needed to be managed in an effective way. Each of their clients needed to register records of tasks required. At the same time, employees needed records of attendance and injury manager in order to mitigate risk and reduce costs.
Flex helped SSE to put one single process in place to manage all their facilities, giving SSE the power to control their data. Time, tasks, incidents and training is done through Flex, saving time and money using a centralise solution.
Flex digitalised all their information, allowing access at any time across locations.
Summary
SSE has rigorous processes in place, as it is vital for them to maintain their high quality of services for all facilities. Throughout the years SSE’s processes were completed with multiple paper-based systems, but they needed to have a system more agile in order to expand. Keeping high standards of quality but continue to grow as a company.
Flex brought digitization to their business, being the best business partner. Flex encouraged traceability of their operation no matter how remote the location of their customer, build comprehensive records of their employees, their actions and mitigate mistakes in maintaining a single system for their records.
Read below to understand how it has been their journey to achieve this goal.
Modules
- Injury Manager
- Time and Attendance
- Task Manager
- Employee Profile
- Training Manager
- Audits
- Scheduled Reports
- Alerts & Notifications
- Injury Manager
- Time and Attendance
- Task Manager
- Employee Profile
- Training Manager
- Audits
- Scheduled Reports
- Alerts & Notifications
Improvement 1: Injury Manager
All injury records at SSE were paper-based. The tricky part was to find a record when the time has passed. For example, three years later if a claim comes into place, it would be difficult to retrieve that full record over time without Flex, as different factors could influence such as (rotating staff, supervisors, documentation missing, etc). Nowadays, incidents are a very sensitive topic, as they can lead to misunderstanding and an extraordinary amount of money from fines or claims.
Co-workers: Some employees are more orientated to details than others if the documentation were missing some details that could lead to fines/claims in the future.
Management: They were not aware of the most common injuries and all the root causes/conditions for injuries in their workplace. This can be very helpful to mitigate accidents.
Solution:
The Flex Manager integrated platform, allows SSE to get clear visibility of their incidents or accidents across facilities and keep them over time. They could also record the recovery period, attach doctors’ appointments and progress of any case. Every employee can log incidents from their app and add supportive documentation to it, include external or internal witnesses to the incident and a whole process of validation. The incident reporting process can be as complicated as SSE wanted, adding different stages to review the process. All interested parties are notified every time the status of the incident has been moved. Management and supervisors can set up reports to notify all incidents per area every week, evaluating the most common categories. This helps them to add improvements to different areas within SSE.
Improvement 2: Equipment Assignment
They had a sign in and out paper-based process. Keeping records of everything on a per location basis but they were not interlinked with the payroll. If someone was missing for a few days and their supervisor forgot to notify the finance department, that person could receive an overpayment, as an example. SSE have multiple different locations and they also have different shifts making extremely difficult to track everything manually.
Co-Workers: Time consuming trying to share information between facilities and management.
Supervisors: No real time visibility of who was working in an exact moment of time, how many people, who are checked out of the company or within the building. Important for security measures tracking of external visitors.
Management: No reports to check time and attendance.
Solution:
Flex Manager solution streamlined of their employees’ attendance, SSE can display in real-time who is on-site and identify easily their external visitors. There is no overtime payment as all their time and attendance is recorded automatically using NFC technology. The management receives weekly reports of their employees, giving full transparency of their attendance.
Improvement 3: Task Manager
Departments did not have a direct channel of communication, where tasks could be classified per area. SSE used to register all of these requirements on folders, making it difficult to share information with other facilities.
Co-Workers: They couldn’t prove that a task was finished on time, as they didn’t have the accurate real time records.
Supervisors: Required the supervisors to exchange information with other locations via email or phone.
Management: No oversight across multiple locations. No traceability of who is executing what and the length of time assigned for each task.
Solution:
Task manager is one of the modules, that it has been very beneficial for SSE. Task Manager interlinked each area of the organisation, they have a category for each department. For example, accounts, human resources, special orders, payroll, etc. Each task has interested parties who receive notifications of all the updates in relation to that task. Additionally, they can add supporting material: pictures, PDFs or videos. Supervisors have visibility of their team’s tasks summary, they can monitor tasks assignment, how many of those are overdue and they can just click a task to see the comprehensive history.
Improvement 4: Employee Profile
Previously, SSE had paper-based records of all employees’ details, supervisor, emergency contacts, role, driving license, equipment assigned to them. It was difficult for them to track their employees’ training records and the foresee expiring training.
Employees’ records: Upload manual documents to folders to ensure all relevant documentation i.e. insurance, contracts, training records. Those folders had duplicate information as some of them were saved locally.
Supervisors: No visibility of updated information in each facility.
Managers: Difficult to keep records of observations that have been made to the employee’s overtime.
Solution:
Flex Manager gives transparency to SSE for all employee-related activities. On Flex Manager they can keep their training records, see all their responsibilities, supervisors, location history, incident reports and all the activities they executed on Flex. Also, employers can keep records of their time and attendance, their time-off, their expenses and their behavioural observations. Allowing a full trace and visibility of their team.
Improvement 5: Training Manager
Inductions and Orientations used to take considerable time as they needed to arrange the speaker and allocate the time involved with this activity. It used to take longer even more for the external contractors, as they used to do their inductions only once they arrived on site. They did not have oversight of the expired certifications and future schedule for courses.
Co-Workers: Documentation updated manually.
Supervisors: They needed to double-check all folders periodically to ensure their employees where updated with their certifications.
Management: Managers needed to speed up the process as the training of employee had been taking up a lot of resources.
Solution:
The centralised system, Flex Manager, brought a user-friendly way to complete inductions for new employees. It allowed online mandatory training for suppliers and certifications for their own employees. They have access to different types of course material, the content type can be slides, videos and questions, also each course can have different sections. Time-saving as everything is done through the platform. Managers receive reports each month with outstanding courses and the upcoming due dates, allowing SSE to be prepared on time.
Improvement 6: Stock Manager
Spreadsheet-based procedure. The stocks used to be managed manually per location, they didn’t have visibility of other facilities. They needed to improve data transparency to plan accordingly and be notified of their further purchases when the levels were low.
SSE Employees: Validation between facilities to check the stock levels. Transfer stock between facilities was very complex.
Supervisors: Sometimes it was easier to ask someone else than to try check for one piece of information.
Managers: No visibility between locations, what they have or what they need for their operation.
Solution:
Flex Manager automated SSE stock management across facilities. They started to transfer items from facility to another, mitigating the waste or over buying items they had available. It has improved their planning as they receive notifications when the stock levels are low. Interested parties have assigned tasks and everyone in SSE can see real-time updates of their stock.
Improvement 5: Scheduled Reporting
Reports within SSE were using done excel and paper-based. It could take a whole day to compile the information for the monthly report. The challenging part was to figure a way to report on time and attendance of when the workers where on-site, as they were not working on the same place or under the same supervisor. It is one of the main reasons why the administration wanted to find an easier way to obtain weekly and monthly reports.
Co-Workers: Responsible for gathering all the data from different locations and departments.
Supervisors: Ensured that the reports were delivered on time in order to take actions.
Management: They needed to improve the frequency of the reports and add more details to them, as they were very generic.
Solution:
Flex Manager creates automatic reports, scheduled reporting is customisable per area and managers can select the information that is relevant for them. For example, human resources can have an absence report and track the time and attendance of all their employees. They receive weekly reports of all the inspections and maintenance that has been done and the upcoming ones, seeing clearly who is the person responsible and the deadline. They could even set up reports per category so they can see all the upcoming task such as special orders for the next two weeks. Flex enforces flexibility and empowers the control of their operation.
Improvement 6: Notifications & Alerts
SSE used to rely completely on their supervisors to ensure the tasks were completed on time.
Supervisors: Talk directly with their employees to monitor their tasks. No notification mapping when a task was created, finished or overdue.
Managers: No proof of notifications and reminders with red flags when one of the areas was struggling overtime to maintain their task management.
Solution:
Flex Manager allows the team to be informed at all times. System administrators can decide when and how to be notified, SSE rely on Flex to keep their team on track and on time with all their responsibilities. Trigger notifications are sent to the team as a reminder of their upcoming activities, at the same time supervisors are notified when is finished. Notifications are indispensable for companies like SSE, as they work rotating between different facilities.