Our client is a well-established, retail fashion brand that sell their products from their own free-standing stores as well as via concessions in larger department stores like Harrods, Selfridges and John Lewis. They have several store / concession brands and a discount brand for end of season stock that tends to be based in discount outlets. As well as their large number of stores and concessions they also have a head office in London where all their desk-based staff work.

Metro Safety were brought in by the organisation’s newly appointed Facilities and Property Manager. He wanted to overhaul the organisations’ health & safety management and was particularly keen to combine quality risk assessments and expertise with more advanced technology that made it easier for staff and management to attain health and safety compliance organisation wide.

To win the contract, Metro Safety pitched a combination of SafetySMART’s existing and proposed features and functionality that would provide the integrated health and safety platform they required. 

• To provide high-quality, online health and safety courses to staff based on their roles*
• To provide a means for recording incidents and accidents generally, plus the ability to recognise when and how an incident should be reported to HSE*
• To provide a means for store management to conduct weekly health and safety surveys*
• To provide fire risk assessments and water risk assessments across their portfolio
• To provide ad hoc consultancy and advice re fire, health and safety, water etc.
• Allow the board visibility of compliance across their portfolio
• Manage all actions on one platform.

*New Feature/Products that we committed to delivering.

Our agile and incremental development approach combined with SafetySMART’s ultra-configurable technology allowed us to quickly specify and develop the Incident and Survey features that our client required.

The crux of the product for store-based staff is the humble health and safety notice. This has been reimagined to contain a QR Code which can be scanned by any member of staff with their smart phone to access a webpage for their specific building. From this starting point, they can begin any one of the following core user journeys: read health and safety documents like fire risk assessments, report an incident, conduct a health and safety survey, or report a case.

Retail is well-known for having a high turnover of staff and our client was no exception. To keep costs down and avoid complexity, we managed to achieve this without store staff being required to log in.

• The Facilities and Property Management team are able to log in and view all records generated by the store management team on the Incidents, Surveys or Cases pages, respectively.
• They can now get an overview of the stores conducting weekly surveys and those that aren’t. Any failed criteria in the survey generates a Case, which automatically appears in the Cases page.
• Any failed criteria found during a risk assessment e.g., fire, water, health and safety also results in a Case on the Cases page, where they can be triaged, allocated and managed to completion.

Additionally, we partnered with learning management system experts, iHasco Ltd, to provide all their staff with relevant, IOSH-approved online training courses.

Metro Safety Group have been able to provide a more integrated health and safety experience to the retailer and its employees thanks to Safety SMART. This digital product augments, enables and enhances the physical assessments, consultancy, maintenance and testing services we’ve been providing for 30 years.

Safety SMART enables all the retailer’s staff to quickly and easily conduct essential health and safety activities relevant to their role and environment. It provides those responsible and accountable for health and safety with a single source of truth from which to manage compliance and performance and has made reporting that progress much easier.

Shop staff have more time to focus on sales thanks to our health and safety notice QR code. There’s no need to scramble around to find a password and open Excel and Outlook. Now they just get out their phone, scan the QR code and they have instant, password-free access to the system. The carefully controlled permissions we provide, enable them to complete a range of important health and safety use cases for their store without concern for security: complete weekly H&S self-surveys, report H&S issues, read published H&S documents relating to their store and, finally, report incidents/accidents/near misses (with built in HSE ‘RIDDOR’ status and notifications, so senior staff know when a RIDDOR has occurred and must be reported to HSE).

Our client and his colleagues in Property/Facilities/Asset Management now have 360-degree, real-time visibility of their portfolio from a health and safety perspective. Weekly store survey completion is up more than 300%; incident notifications are received by key staff as soon as they’re added to system, so litigation risks can be actively mitigated from Day 0; issues discovered during a store survey are automatically added to the system as cases without any emailing back and forth; organisation-wide staff training enrolment is now automated, based on environment and role and completion, neatly summarised as a % by store, region and country.

Finally, one of the biggest successes has been our open collaboration on new features, which not only benefits our client, but all of Metro Safety’s Retail Customers.