The Environment, Health & Safety team at Smiths headquarters in London have overall responsibility for all 143 Smiths sites worldwide. Urban Element were approached with a view to providing an online application for Environment, Health & Safety Data Collection and Anaysis
The Client
Smiths is a global technology company listed on the London Stock Exchange. A world leader in the practical application of advanced technologies, Smiths Group delivers products and services for the threat & contraband detection, medical devices, energy and communications markets worldwide. Smiths Group employs more than 20,000 people in over 50 countries. For more information visit www.smiths.com
The Need
The Environment, Health & Safety team at Smiths headquarters in London have overall responsibility for all 143 Smiths sites worldwide. Apart from the vast day to day workload and frequent travelling that this obviously entails, there is a requirement, partly driven by Governmental Legislation, but also driven from a desire to learn and improve on behalf of Smiths, to gather and report on a range of statistics relating to Environment, Health & Safety at each and every site.
Prior to the inception of the Sheperd Web Application, data gathering was achieved through the use of an Excel Spreadsheet, containing multiple sheets for data entry, general site information, and help & guidance. It was necessary to generate a unique, blank, spreadsheet file for each site, applying the built-in language translations as appropriate, which could then be emailed out to the appropriate personnel at the sites. It was then necessary to manually chase each and every spreadsheet to ensure that all were returned in a timely fashion, for the team at headquarters to collate prior to generating the reports.
The Solution
Urban Element were approached with a view to providing an online version of the spreadsheet, which would have the obvious advantages of dispensing with the manual send & return, and data collation & reporting processes, as well as making the collected data available in real time as it was collected.
It was immediately clear from our initial discussions that we would be able to leverage our skills, knowledge and core technology to deliver a far more comprehensive and powerful solution than had at first been envisaged. The project was perfectly suited to a Web Application type solution.
The first step was to produce a Technical Proposal with the aim of describing not just the nature of our solution for the original brief, but also describing exactly how we felt the solution could be enhanced to take advantage of tools developed in-house. Hence the proposal had 3 scopes, each assigned a value, for the Client to consider.
The next step was to engage in a two week consultancy period, involving all day meetings with the client both at their offices and at our offices here in Oxfordshire, in order to define and agree the features and functionality of the chosen solution. This resulted in an agreed Technical Specification, with costs, timescales and payment prompts that formed the basis of the contract to supply Sheperd to Smiths.
The Results
The Sheperd Web Application is now live and in-service, hosted on our own dedicated Web Application & database servers in a secure data centre. The Group Administrators, Divisional Administrators and Data Administrators are able to login securely and access the parts of the system for which they are responsible (and have permission), from any location (with an internet connection) at any time of the day or night.
The data administrators can login and enter Environment data, Safety data, Safety Incident Data & Enforcement Actions from wherever they are, with context help and general help & guidance in the language of their choice (the system supports 11 languages currently).
The system is able to chase late data entries according to a set of Reminder Rules that the Group Administrators manage. It will set alerts and send emails (if desired) if and when an Enforcement Action is entered into the system.
For all active users, including those with reporting permissions only, the reporting engine can produce a multitude of reports scoped by any part of the business and/or geographical location worldwide, using up to the minute live data.