Strengthening and streamlining safety practices are helping lead New Zealand construction company, Hawkins, to build better quality buildings.
Hawkins has partnered with HammerTech, the world’s leading safety software provider for the construction industry, to access quality real time health and safety data to help make its sites safer and more productive.
“A well-planned project, where strong health, safety and environment and site logistics are essential, has a direct impact on reducing injuries, productivity, and constructing better quality buildings,” says Matthew Taylor, GM Hawkins – South.
“HammerTech’s safety platform and reporting capability helps our teams plan, process, and review safety and logistics information in a structured way – that’s essential for the wellbeing of our teams and subcontractors, as well as increasing productivity.”
With more than 75 years of experience in the New Zealand market, across a wide-ranging portfolio of projects, Hawkins is looked up to as health and safety leader in the local construction industry.
“Having a tool like HammerTech that embeds into our process has meant we are really starting to see the positive effect of improved task planning on our projects," says Mr Taylor.
“From a safety perspective, a platform like HammerTech is good for the industry."
Hawkins’ focus on Zero Harm drives everything the company does. Key to this strategy is managing critical risks that can harm workers.
“Critical risks can really hurt people and managing them is all about planning. We identify the critical risks then ensure we have an effective plan in place to negate them. We use HammerTech as a tool to let us investigate that process easily and effectively.”
Matthew uses the example of a challenging crane lift where key elements need to be in place, such as relevant training to undertake the task and ensuring adequate supervision is available.
“HammerTech enables the project manager to look at the task analysis, select the crane lift on a certain date, and ensure all parties are signed on to it. That ability to dip into the system, get to a task level if required, or to look at induction metrics on the dashboard, is key to giving project managers certainty that it has been well planned.
With a diverse portfolio, ranging from hundreds of thousands to billions of dollars, Hawkins is focused on improving productivity and performance – ensuring its projects are run as effectively and productively as possible.
One way to achieve this was to implement a safety software solution that can support projects of different sizes.
“We look for tools that simplify processes, are mobile, and provide the ability for our management to review implementation in real time. This all helps increase productivity,” says Mr Taylor.
“We expect a similar standard of output on health and safety and quality on all projects – no matter their size. A single safety resource may be overseeing multiple projects and it can be difficult to manage and review the volume of information. A product like HammerTech that helps us get a snapshot and make a lot of that information more accessible from anywhere, is very sought-after.”
HammerTech will become the go to safety solution for Hawkins to gradually digitise the current internal system. The HammerTech platform will also significantly reduce the number of platforms that Hawkins use across projects to control elements like crane operations, site entry, and site logistics.
“HammerTech consolidates all that," says Mr Taylor. "For example, a subcontractor can input their information directly into our system helping increase efficiencies and reduce the risk of errors."
As part of its selection process, Hawkins compared a number of safety software systems to test their effectiveness, capability, and cost.
“We looked at form builder tools. And while they offered a high level of customisation, they would have placed a huge burden on our team to do the configuration.
"We found HammerTech to be the most fully formed and well-tested solution. It was also cost effective when measured against the other systems, and met the majority of our business needs with the option to adapt to our own process documentation and requirements.”
Importantly, says Mr Taylor, HammerTech is fully localised and supports New Zealand’s health and safety protocols, including essential factors such as staged inductions, task planning, and familiar terminology.
For more information, visit http://www.hammertech.com.