How Integration Technology Made Nelmac a Healthier and Safer Organisation
Working to keep Nelson beautiful
If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of people who live across the top of the South Island, particularly within the borders of Nelson City Council, the Tasman District Council and Marlborough, you can thank Nelmac for the landscaping and maintenance of many of the parks and public spaces that are there for all to enjoy.
An asset management company contracted by the council, Nelmac’s work encompasses a broad range of tasks, including landscape architecture, planting and restoration, tracks and trails, refuse and recycling, and a wealth of other infrastructure and environmental management projects. The diversity of responsibilities demands flexibility, forward planning and excellent communication across the different teams within Nelmac.
And the fact that much of this work is physical, from weed control to fixing park benches, means that there is inherent risk in undertaking it.
Ensuring a safe and healthy workplace
Workplace health and safety is an area of acute focus in New Zealand. Employers must take every possible step to ensure their workers are safe, and even the most minor of accidents can see a company like Nelmac paying an incredibly high price, as outlined in the sweeping Health and Safety at Work Act (HSWA) reform of 2015. This act and related regulations demand the highest level of protection for workers from risk, so far as is reasonably practicable.
Nevertheless, accidents continue to happen, and the costs, both physical and financial, continue to pile up. In the first six months of 2021, the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) reported over 100,000 new claims totalling almost half a billion dollars.
Nelmac utilised vWork, a cloud-based job scheduling and dispatch tool, as their internal job and field worker management/ERP system. Understanding the need to keep its workers safe, the company used forms within vWork to outline and manage their health and safety plan, as well as log things like risks, near misses, and any actual incidents that occurred.
But while vWork served as a simple place for any team member to log this information, it wasn’t necessarily a system built to handle these tasks. Nelmac therefore needed to transfer this data into another system – Damstra’s Intel Vault – a solution built from the ground up to handle the minutiae of workplace health and safety. The company did so by manually copying data from vWork into Damstra.
It was a process that was clunky, time-consuming and prone to error, and Nelmac knew that there had to be a better way. With the help of Seamless, the company found just that.
Turning real world events into actionable data
To the experts at Seamless, this was a problem with a rather simple but incredibly effective solution: integration.
Seamless worked to get the vWork system talking to the Damstra Intel Vault solution. It engineered an integration that saw the vWork health and safety reports collated and pushed through to Damstra Intel Vault in a way that the latter tool would understand.
Rather than migrating the data every so often (sometimes it was done weekly, at other times monthly), the Seamless integration saw data being transferred in near-real time, with updates happening within Damstra every 15 minutes.
The solution also checked that data, ensuring the information going from vWork to Vault was complete and compliant. In instances where it wasn’t, a notification was sent to an admin to check the vWork data. Managers were also notified whenever there was a health and safety incident in vWork that needed to be reviewed before it was sent to Vault.
A more proactive approach
With daily happenings in the field now reflected in Damstra, the Nelmac health and safety team were granted a far more thorough understanding of the organisation’s situation, and far more control over it. Where weeks or even months could previously pass between a risk or near miss being logged and action being taken, Nelmac’s internal teams were now immediately made aware of any potential issues, allowing them to get on top of them before they came to pass.
The new system even sent out alerts whenever one of Nelmac’s 300 employees logged an issue to ensure appropriate action was taken straight away. The integration has allowed Nelmac’s formerly reactive approach to be traded for something far more proactive.
