MyMobileWorkers | How digital management is making highways accreditation more accessible

Getting your highways business accredited can be a daunting process and particularly so for smaller scale operations.

The financial costs and administrative resources that are required can make accreditation a prohibitively arduous exercise for all but the largest of highways businesses.

It creates an uneven playing field in which industry credentials are liable to depend more on a company’s size than on their ability to meet industry standards.

This can stifle the growth of a business; limiting eligibility for a raft of contracts and tenders and reducing competitiveness when pitching against bigger scale accredited rivals.

This is a traditional barrier that technology is helping to remove with digital processes empowering businesses to better handle the administrative challenges that are posed by accreditation.

The use of highways maintenance software is proving to be a particularly powerful tool, allowing easy access to accurate data on every aspect of a highways operation.

Practical benefits

An example of the benefits this delivers can be seen with the process required to achieve ISO 45001 accreditation. This is the recently introduced international standard for occupational health and safety standards.

Accreditation requires a company to demonstrate they have a documented occupational health and safety management system (OHSMS) in place. They need to show how this framework allows risks to be effectively identified and controlled.

But a documented process does not require paperwork; the information is just as valid when it’s handled in a digital format. This is the kind of information that’s automatically generated and tracked by digital workforce management software.

A system such as MyMobileWorkers tracks and logs each stage of a working process, including all of the various health and safety checks, protocols and activities that are carried out during a task.

This can include time-stamped and annotated digital images of work sites showing safety procedures in place. A visual record helps to guard against the risks of safety becoming a ‘box-ticking’ exercise.

Digital audit

This data creates a full audit trail, showing the individual ownership and status of each task, together with a log of activities that take place – the time, location and status.

With integrated reporting tools, all of this data is instantly accessible. Detailed reports that would typically take hours to collate with a paper-based approach can be created in a matter of minutes.

Having easy access to this information helps to greatly reduce the administrative burden when required to demonstrate working processes. And once accreditation has been achieved, it helps to show that standards are being properly maintained.

The benefits of this kind of digital approach are helping to level the playing field, giving highways companies of all shapes and sizes the administrative tools they require to handle the demands of industry accreditation.

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