Construction Organizations can Minimize Risks, Improve Safety Standards and Increase Efficiency with Ventiv IRM
Even though construction firms have to navigate many of the same risks faced by other sectors, they also have to manage risk to human life and well-being, both for employees and clients. This results in a diverse—and potentially unpredictable—risk environment. But as a construction leader or risk manager, you can gain deep visibility into the risks you may face and mitigate or prevent them with the right integrated risk management solution.
But a risk management system does more than surface potential issues. It also serves as a data mining tool you can use to fine-tune safety standards and boost efficiency across your organization.
Minimize Risk Using Risk Data
Reducing risk using data is far easier with risk management tools. With Ventiv IRM, for example, you can collect risk data via mobile devices in the hands of site managers and overseers. For instance, you could issue a safety checklist to project managers at every job site. It may include questions regarding whether workers are using safety equipment, following injury prevention protocols, and even more granular data, such as how many workers are handling specific, labor-intensive tasks.
As your project managers input this data, it empowers you to make strategic decisions, in real-time to minimize risk. For instance, suppose at one site, workers are overloading boom lifts, packing them with steel beams to cut installation time. Given the damage this could cause to your lift and the injury a misbalanced beam could cause, you can place a quick call and tell the crew to take it easy with how they’re loading the boom.
Leverage Data to Perform Risk Audits
With risk audits, you can assess the risk of each type of construction and then limit or eliminate the most risky jobs. You can design a customized risk assessment form that quantifies the level of risk associated with tasks performed in each type of project.
Then, you could decide to cut back on taking certain kinds of jobs if:
- The risk of injury exceeds a certain threshold
- Covering the risks associated with a particular kind of construction drives premiums too high
- The cost of limiting risk, perhaps by hiring more workers or buying new equipment, drives your overhead beyond acceptable levels
For example, a risk audit of your roofing division may reveal that it’s more prone to workers’ compensation claims than plumbing. To reduce risk and the associated premiums, delays, and productivity impacts, you may consider shutting down your roofing division and doubling down on your plumbing division.
You could also choose to reduce your risk by outsourcing all of your roofing to contractors, shifting the risk to them instead of shouldering it yourself.
Improve Safety with a Repository of Risk Incidents
An effective IRM solution brings all risk incidents and close calls to the surface. With this information, you can assess your overall risk profile and improve safety. At the same time, by reducing the number of incidents, you also support a more efficient operation.
For example, a construction company may have several different divisions, all working under the same top-level leadership. For instance, you might have a commercial division that focuses on office buildings and other business spaces and also a residential division for building condos and developments.
With an integrated risk management tool, you can glean incident data from both divisions, analyze it, then use it to limit your total cost of risk. For instance, suppose your commercial division has 25% more on-the-job injuries than your residential unit. In addition to investigating why, you can also use this info to adjust your insurance premiums. Instead of paying the same to insure both business units, you can talk with your insurance company and negotiate lower rates for your residential division.
Another way to reduce your total cost of risk with an incident repository is to use this data to design safety training. These may involve implementing incident-specific protocols and teaching your employees how to follow them and why.
But with a trove of risk data at your fingertips, you may also identify incident trends you can attack with certification programs. Whether you have employees and managers enroll in the Association of Construction Safety Professionals (ACSP) courses, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) programs, or those from another organization, these kinds of continuing education programs can dramatically reduce your company’s risk exposure.
Increase Efficiency with Risk Management Tools
Risk management solutions introduce several different ways of boosting efficiency, especially for construction risk managers:
- You can automate time-intensive elements of the claims process, such as by automatically generating letters and filling out mandated state forms
- Automate the insurance renewal process using the IRM’s data-gathering and analysis capabilities
- Eliminate duplicate data entries and other data management challenges that consume time for claims managers
- Make quicker, data-based risk decisions using the comprehensive information the IRM provides
- Build faster reports for presenting to other decision-makers and company principals
- Perform quick analytics instead of combing through reams of data and manually building spreadsheets
Armed with Ventiv’s IRM, you can build data-based strategies for reducing risk, boosting safety standards, and increasing efficiency—all in a centralized system accessible to all stakeholders. You don’t have to worry about risk data siloes or risks getting out of control at certain sites because you get the risk information you need in real-time.
Learn more about what Ventiv can do for your construction company by reaching out for a demo today.
