An Obligation to Safety
As one of the largest construction contractors in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, Kokosing is known for building, maintaining, and expanding industrial manufacturing plants, water and wastewater systems, power plants, highways, bridges, landfills, and more. A family-owned business since its foundation in 1951, Kokosing has continuously demonstrated a commitment to preserving the well-being of its workers, as well as that of their families and communities, for decades.
Their Challenge
For a while, Kokosing conducted inspections on paper forms, which hadn’t caused much trouble on the compliance front—a rarity, considering how finicky such systems tend to be. As they are prone to do, however, the paper-based system fell short when it came to enabling the standardization necessary for easy and effective organization and analysis.
Considering that Kokosing has a hand in so many distinct industries, it is not surprising that each site used different methods to conduct tasks and inspections—not surprising, but definitely a problem. After all, if each sector performs tasks and inspections in their own way, conducting corporation-wide analysis is virtually impossible!
Not only did spreadsheets and pivot tables fall short when it came to standardizing analysis, they also actively slowed down inspectors at Kokosing. When conducting inspections, they were presented with every single inspection question used by Kokosing in any capacity—regardless of relevancy. Having to sort through questions to parse out which were applicable to the inspection currently being performed took a significant amount of time, consequently making employees feel like they had to rush to get them done in a timely manner.
Our Solution
At a National Safety Council Conference, Kokosing’s heads of safety, Adam and Nick, happened upon the solution they had been searching for. Smart Safety Pro, an expertly architected safety compliance software system, presented them with an opportunity to revolutionize how inspection data was collected, accessed, and analyzed.
Now, post-implementation, workers at Kokosing are performing faster and more mindful inspections than before, thanks to several factors. At the beginning of every Kokosing inspection template created by Smart Safety Pro, users select the operation and task they are performing, which determines the rest of the template’s questions; In short, workers are now only presented with questions relevant to their present operation and task.
Smart Safety Pro is beneficial to administrators as well, as they can create different inspection templates using the same questions. Doing so ensures that no matter who is inspecting an asset, the inspection procedure itself remains the same each time, solving Kokosing’s issue with standardizing practices. Additionally, questions being shared across templates used in separate industries guarantees consistency in reports. It also simplifies the process of identifying problematic correlations between the selection of certain answers and the occurrence of incidents.
What Separates Smart Safety Pro From the Crowd
According to Nick, Kokosing has “never even looked at switching” inspection software providers. Adam says that after being introduced to the concept of a digital inspection system, they shopped around, but found that no other platform offered the same perks as Smart Safety Pro—particularly the abilities to customize templates and work offline. “We are often where we don’t have cell or internet service,” he says. They decided to take a chance on Smart Safety Pro and, happy with this choice, have stuck with it ever since.
Key Features of Smart Safety Pro
The Impact
Beyond enabling the standardization and simplification of the processes of collecting, accessing, and analyzing inspection data, digitizing with Smart Safety Pro also aided in changing toxic employee mentalities around safety practices.
For instance, Kokosing used a custom heat illness prevention template to repeatedly expose workers to questions that forced them to re-evaluate their own behaviors. Forced off of auto-pilot, workers gradually came to prioritize the safety principles they knew, but weren’t making a conscious effort to uphold.
Driving awareness of safety issues via inspections not only reduces incident rates, but also gives Kokosing’s higher ups a sense of peace. “I feel better knowing that our safety team did 120 heat illness prevention audit inspections this spring and that we’re… prepared for the heat,” Nick says. He can testify that inspections don’t have to be complicated to be effective—they just have to be consistent.
