The most recent Safe Work Australia statistics reveal a workplace fatality rate of 1.7 per 100,000 workers, while there are 42.6 work related injuries per 1,000 workers. To put that in context, in 2015, 193 workers lost their lives at work in Australia.
Workplace safety has always been front and centre for Australian company, SafetyCulture. With a heritage delivering enterprise safety services, SafetyCulture recognised that technology could be leveraged to simplify and streamline essential safety processes and set about developing mobile-first software solutions to radically improve workplace safety audits.
SafetyCulture iAuditor is now the most widely used inspection app in the world with an audit performed every two seconds. While workplace safety has always been the primary focus, the SafetyCulture application is now increasingly being embraced by end users to tackle other issues where there’s clear benefit in having access to comprehensive real time data – for example to conduct quality audits, for security inspections, for training purposes, and to manage asset maintenance programmes.
The SafetyCulture iAuditor app and platform is now available to Windows 10 users following unprecedented demand from businesses.
Originally developed for iOS and Android device users, the system has now been enhanced and extended for Microsoft, taking full advantage of unique Windows 10 functions and the Universal Windows Platform (UWP).
Gillian Findlay, Chief Operating Officer of SafetyCulture, explains that the iAuditor application is already used 50,000 times each and every day, and remains on a steep growth trajectory with more than 30 million inspections conducted already.
Not only does the tool enhance workplace safety, and empower employees to take responsibility for their own safety, it also provides enterprises with a window on operations. This allows them to optimise the workplace often long before a problem arises, reducing the impact of costly breakdowns or shutdowns, and ensuring the safety of staff and contractors.
Meanwhile, the expanding raft of other-use applications for the app has made it a core business tool for a consistently growing user base.
Windows demand
“It was quite an easy decision for us to develop a Windows app because our customers were asking when it was coming just about every day,” says Findlay. She says that many of the company’s larger clients already had Microsoft environments and were keen to leverage a native Windows version of the app.
Having native functionality is particularly important in some environments such as mines or remote construction sites where a network connection might not be available; having a thin native app means that iAuditor can still be used and any data collected in the app uploaded to the SafetyCulture platform later, when internet access is available.
With Windows 10 it will be a seamless experience between the native app and the platform, and we’ve got features like the pen – where if you take a picture using the native app and you want to annotate it using the pen. That’s super-easy on the Windows app.
“We see a real opportunity across lots of verticals and especially in the bigger end of town who are rolling out Microsoft products,” Findlay says, adding that the company secured many hundreds of sign-ups for the Windows app within weeks of announcing its Microsoft plans.
One relatively new user of SafetyCulture iAuditor is ICC Sydney. The International Convention Centre Sydney (ICC Sydney) will be a premier Asia Pacific integrated convention, exhibition and entertainment precinct and the Windows 10 iAuditor application will be used for operational readiness testing ahead of its December 2016 opening.
The Windows 10 version of iAuditor is one of the technologies the venue is embracing to meet its world class standards of quality and safety.
Safety heritage
SafetyCulture was founded in Townsville in 2004 by Luke Anear. With the widespread adoption and deployment of mobile technologies, the company – under Anear’s leadership – decided to take a mobile-first approach to safety solutions, and in 2012 delivered its SafetyCulture iAuditor mobile app to streamline safety audits.
Instead of traditional employer-driven compliance – where a safety audit often involved sending out a staff member armed a clipboard and a checklist to complete manually, with the information later typed up and filed away – the iAuditor app puts the safety audit into the hands of employees, empowering them to take control of their work environment.
The iAuditor app puts the safety audit into the hands of employees, empowering them to take control of their work environment.
The company deploying the solution can quickly use iAuditor app’s drag-and-drop tools to build tailored checklists. Those checklists can then be completed on the mobile device and immediately made available to head office if internet access is available from the shop-floor, or later if the app is used in a remote site without immediate online access.
Using a smartphone or tablet employees can quickly – but comprehensively – check the safety of the environment they work in, note anything awry, even take photos of problem areas. That audit can then be uploaded to the SafetyCulture platform providing instant visibility into conditions in the factory, mine, laboratory or any other workplace.
Sold and deployed internationally, iAuditor has been embraced locally by Australian giants such as Coca-Cola Amatil, Coles and BHP Billiton. But the flexibility of the tool makes it equally applicable to small and medium enterprises which have harnessed the iAuditor app and SafetyCulture to ensure worker safety and achieve regulatory compliance.
Regardless of the scale of the enterprise iAuditor for Windows 10 provides an effective, customisable solution to organisations in every sector which see safety, compliance and quality as core enterprise values.
