It’s that time of year again: Budget season. Many of our clients are working feverishly to prioritize, build a business case, and present their needs to the leadership. The reality is that many, if not most, proposed safety projects are either rejected or postponed. That’s right—you may be facing another year without being able to take account of your people quickly and accurately.
inFRONT has helped customers build successful business cases and get projects approved for years. Maybe we can help your site as well. Here are a few creative and effective justifications that have helped customers secure project funding. It’s not a complete list but may spark some ideas for your team:
1. Risk Management:
- Executive Response/Public Relations – This is the hardest to quantify and the most challenging to overcome if incidents occur. Your site director, plant manager, or vice president will hold a press conference. They confirm that all people have been accounted for and announce this to shareholders, the local community, and company employees. They will also tell local law enforcement and first responders that everyone is safe. Does your site have easy-to-use, accurate, and verifiable tools to make this claim? If not, the results could be tragic.
- Ability to drill more frequently – If a routine exercise or drill takes an hour, it’s unlikely you will get support from management to run frequent drills. This lack of practice leaves the site more vulnerable to the risks inherent in incident response. However, if you have a tool that allows for 15-minute drills AND provides actionable information after each drill to ensure improvement and more readiness, the risk goes down. As the old saying goes, “a safer plant is a more profitable plant.”
2. Time on Tools:
- If you digitize the sign-in/sign-out process in your high-hazard units, there are proven opportunities to reduce the administrative time and increase Time on Tools. This is especially true during a Turnaround. inFRONT has a customer that documented a time on tools benefit of over $150K during one turnaround event. Find some compelling figures here.
- Faster drills don’t just reduce risk, they improve productivity. If an hour-long exercise can be reduced to 15 minutes, that’s 45 minutes back in production! Imagine the productivity and cost savings if your site has 500 extra contractors working a turnaround!
3. ERT Availability:
- Most plants still spend an hour or so EVERY shift calling around to each control room to take a census of ERTs available for that shift. Then, a safety professional takes the time to fill in a spreadsheet for that shift’s ERTs. What if this process were eliminated and happened instantly as each ERT member badged onsite? This would be 2-3 days per year of improved productivity for many sites.
4. Remote Work:
- The post-Covid trend of flexible days or alternating days for non-production staff onsite has created a gap in many customers’ accountability process. Preprinted lists or gate logs are ineffective since personnel are not all onsite on the same days. AllClear’s “NOW” page provides real-time awareness of the exact population at any given moment. This dramatically increases the ability to focus on only those people who are at risk.
5. Emergency Readiness as a Service:
- The “as a service” model of technology delivery is a virtual standard for the Digital Transformation efforts of the world’s best companies. inFRONT developed ERaaS as a way for you and your team to protect your capital, secure funding, and continue to improve your site’s emergency readiness. A couple of key features that attract customers to this option are the elimination of annual maintenance costs and the ability to include AllClear in the site’s operational budget instead of capital.
Success in gaining funding and delivering on safety promises is crucial to your success as an emergency response leader. inFRONT welcomes the chance to discuss some of these ideas or to learn creative ways you have succeeded in securing funding.
Regardless, we wish you the best of success this budget season.