Automating EHS at scale with PJ Hegarty

Hannah Colley00:00

Hello everyone, and welcome to Automating EHS at Scale featuring PJ Hegarty. I'm Hannah, digital marketing and events specialist here at FlowForma, and I'll be your host for today's event.

Hannah Colley00:15

Before we get started, some housekeeping. This webinar is being recorded, and if you need any assistance you can email info@flowforma.com. Your lines are muted, but we want to make this as interactive as possible, so pop your questions in the questions box or the chat. We'll have polls throughout, and a survey at the end.

Hannah Colley00:40

Here's our agenda. We'll look at FlowForma and the backstory of why we're here, then our interview with FlowForma customer PJ Hegarty. We'll also look beyond health and safety at scaling process automation, share a few customer stats, and finish with a live Q&A.

Hannah Colley01:17

Let's meet our speakers. We're joined by Sinead, EHS regional manager at PJ Hegarty. She's focused on improving safety and reducing risk through digital innovation. Thanks so much for joining us, Sinead.

Sinead Gaines01:34

Thank you.

Hannah Colley01:35

We also have Niamh Lordan, head of marketing at FlowForma. She's passionate about empowering teams to embrace automation and drive change.

Niamh Lordan01:49

Thanks, Hannah, and thanks so much to Sinead for giving up her time. I know our community loves a real customer story.

Niamh Lordan02:18

Before we jump into the interview with Sinead, which is our spotlight today, there are a few pieces I'd like to cover. We have a mix of people on the call: some are in the FlowForma community, and others are looking at the platform for the first time, so welcome, everyone.

Niamh Lordan02:44

At a high level, FlowForma is a leading process automation tool. It's been in operation for over 12 years, we were first to market with a no-code process automation tool, and since day one we've been about empowering business leaders, plus IT, to digitalize at speed. The platform is all-in-one: you get your forms, your workflow, your document generation and, more importantly, all your reports and insights in one place.

Niamh Lordan03:26

Over the last couple of years, the product has gained an AI layer. Users now use FlowForma Copilot to speed up how fast they can digitalize processes, plus AI agents and assistants to help with execution. That's a little background that will help people understand what the platform does before we get into the case study.

Niamh Lordan04:06

We've had great interest in today's webinar, so let's ground ourselves in why we're hosting it. When we're at events, or people come to our website asking for support, there are common trends in the conversations our team has with construction EHS and the wider EHS world.

Niamh Lordan04:45

The challenges we hear most are inefficiencies from unstandardized workflows and fragmented systems, sometimes compounded by poor audit trails or a lack of data and visibility. Is that something you still hear when you're at industry events or chatting to peers?

Sinead Gaines05:16

Yes. The biggest challenge for safety people, especially in construction, is that all the construction projects are remote, whether it's one, a couple or 12. It's hard to maintain consistency. When you have remote information and no automated process, there's a delay or a lag in getting that information back and into any sort of standardized view for management to review how they're performing.

Sinead Gaines05:57

It's also a challenge on staffing resources. Safety is all about visibility on the ground, but it's a heavy administrative role as well. You have to strike a balance between being on the ground, being visible and interacting with workers and staff, and hitting all your administrative targets to make sure you're legally compliant. And unfortunately the industry is struggling for resources at the minute.

Niamh Lordan06:29

On top of that, it sounds like construction projects are getting more complex, and claims risk is increasing as well.

Sinead Gaines06:46

There are also stakeholder and client demands. Clients are getting more demanding about the safety standards they want, as well as the industry. And it's a competitive market: you need an edge, and you need to be able to demonstrate safety excellence. So there's a lot to manage.

Niamh Lordan07:16

That slide summarizes what we're hearing from prospects and people in this space. Now we'd love to move into a poll: what is your biggest EHS challenge right now? Hannah's launching it, and your votes help us align our content as closely as we can to your challenges.

Niamh Lordan08:07

Sinead, you're probably seeing the same results as me. The number one challenge in the poll is managing paperwork, inspections, and audits, and it's still increasing in popularity. Any comments on that?

Sinead Gaines08:34

There's a huge volume of paperwork involved in safety, and people don't always realize what's involved. Everything relating to safety is usually a legal or regulatory compliance matter, so you have to document everything. Paperwork is massive in safety, and it's underestimated. Keeping on top of your administrative duties each week is a challenge.

Sinead Gaines09:15

And to change safety culture, you need to be visible: engaging, interacting, coaching and mentoring people. That element is key, so the two have to work hand in hand. Managing paperwork is where automated processes, AI and digitalization help: they free up that time.

Niamh Lordan09:57

Let's jump into our customer spotlight. Sinead, can you share a little about PJ Hegarty as a company and what your role involves?

Sinead Gaines10:10

We celebrated our centenary last year, so the business is 100 years old. We're based in Ireland, where the majority of our work is, and we have some operations in the UK. There are two EHS managers: I look after everything in the eastern region, and there's one for the southern region. I've been in my role with PJ Hegarty for eight years.

Sinead Gaines10:39

PJ Hegarty is a tier-one construction company in Ireland. We deal with complex civils projects, commercial offices, retail fit-out, pharmaceutical and high-tech buildings. We do refurbishment and old buildings, and we're involved in some demolition as well, so it's a broad spectrum in the Irish market.

Niamh Lordan11:08

Can you tell us about your team and how many people are in the EHS department?

Sinead Gaines11:15

In Ireland we have about 35 EHS staff, and about 19 in the eastern region that I look after, split across about 12 main projects. We like to think we're leaders for safety in the industry. We must maintain the minimum legal compliance requirements, but we like to step above that: to improve standards, upskill where we can and be innovative in safety.

Niamh Lordan12:05

Let's move on to your timeline. It's a great illustration of your journey with FlowForma: evaluating it, going live with a trial, launching, and then scaling automation across EHS with some amazing outcomes. Can you bring us back to 2021 and what drove you to look at automating safety behavior observations?

Sinead Gaines12:43

We have a process called SBO, our safety behavior observation program. We designed it ourselves back in 2015 and 2016. It was paper-based, and then everything was entered manually into Excel. We were using macros in the background, but Microsoft was getting stricter and starting to shut those down, so we knew we needed a digital solution. It was probably the most complicated process we had.

Sinead Gaines13:33

We explored a lot of options. Some of our management team and our BIM manager came across FlowForma at a convention, and saw that you could build your own process around what you already have. You don't have to change your process. We didn't want to: other options were changing it and making it less than what it was, and we'd spent so much time getting it right.

Sinead Gaines14:05

So we did a quick test online with some builders over a day or two, to show how we could take our process, digitalize it, make it easy to do and still own it. That was successful, so on the back of it we ran a trial. Building the form was the easy part. The work was deciding where the information goes, what stats you want to pull out, and building our own dashboard around it.

Sinead Gaines15:04

We trialed it on one site for six months, from June to December, and it was hugely successful. By November and December we knew this was something we wanted to roll out company-wide. Straight away the trial increased the volume of observations coming in, improved their quality, and gave us quicker response times on trends. Before, everything was Excel-based and siloed to each project, so the information was delayed.

Sinead Gaines15:46

Launching it across the entire business gave us visibility. We can slice and dice the information any way we want: by country, region or site, over two weeks, a month or six months. And between 2021 and last year we increased our observations by 45%, just by digitalizing the process.

Sinead Gaines16:27

As a manager, I have far greater visibility of what's going on across every site and region, so I can spot developing trends. Projects usually look at their own data, while management and senior directors are looking for trends across the business. We can also compare sites in the same phase, such as civils. Overall the SBO has been a success, and it started prompting the question: what else can we do?

Niamh Lordan17:10

It sounds like a really substantial pilot. You took it seriously, with proper success criteria and outcomes, and you were trying to get rid of the paper and Excel and get your hands on the data to make better decisions.

Sinead Gaines17:37

There are a lot of off-the-shelf products you can plug in and play straight away, and our approach might seem time-consuming. But I know what I want from my process as a safety professional. I'm not an IT person, so my IT manager and my BIM manager were with me the whole way on storage, capacity, and the housekeeping you don't think about: where you store the information and what type of information you'll produce.

Sinead Gaines18:26

If you're a safety professional, I wouldn't go into it on your own. Off-the-shelf is great and it works, but you have to think about the reality of the process. With off-the-shelf we'd have had to change our process, and that's the one sacrifice I wasn't going to make to make my life easier. I'd rather do it right and put in the work.

Niamh Lordan18:51

I love that. I've heard you and Anthony, your IT manager, talk about it before, and it was really important to you for adoption. Change management is a big challenge. Putting processes and forms on tablets and phones is a big change, so you don't want to change the process too. That's a lot of change for users to go through.

Niamh Lordan19:27

Can you talk our attendees through what else you've digitalized? Your visuals on the volume are amazing, so I'd love you to share your automation journey and growth over the last couple of years.

Sinead Gaines19:47

We have other project management tools in place. So we got the EHS team together for a feedback session: what are your bugbears, what's time-consuming, what's giving you the most pain and keeping you at your desk instead of on site? They poured their hearts out to us. SBO worked, so we prioritized everything else by how much time and on-site resource it consumed.

Sinead Gaines20:37

Plant management and permits came next. Permits were paper-based tick-box exercises. There are plenty of off-the-shelf options, and if they work for a company that's fine, but we have very specific rules around some of our permits. Other vendors said they could change them any way we wanted, but when we did our research and made some phone calls, it was time-consuming and difficult to do. We wanted to own our information and our process.

Sinead Gaines21:32

Plant was different from SBO. SBO is one workflow with multiple steps, but it was high-impact: a leading indicator that gave us direction, action plans and trends. Plant was a network: plant onboarding and different types of plant inspection that all had to talk to each other. The same followed with permits.

Sinead Gaines22:14

We have an annual objective for safety digitalization, and we make improvements every year, bit by bit rather than one big chunk. When we sat down with our IT manager and BIM manager, we mapped out on a whiteboard what was already digitalized and working, and we only needed a solution for the other bits. Our safety digitalization runs across three platforms, and FlowForma takes care of plant, SBO, permits and vehicles.

Niamh Lordan23:22

You've done a great job, Sinead. I see on the visual you're up to around 16,000.

Sinead Gaines23:34

That was January, at an average of 14,000. We're now averaging 16,000 individual forms completed every month.

Sinead Gaines23:52

The biggest benefit is compliance. With paper, you could say compliance was good, but when supervisors complain about the pain of permits, I tell them they're only feeling it because they're actually doing the job. Before, it was a tick-box exercise: sign all the permits in the office in the morning. Now the permit comes through on their phone with a notification and the location, and they go and check the work area. It's raised our level of compliance and our standards.

Niamh Lordan24:52

You've talked before about adoption and change, and I love what you've done with QR codes. Can you share a little about that?

Sinead Gaines25:08

If you're a big operation across multiple sites and contractors, it's very difficult to manage licenses. You issue one to a contractor, but you don't know if they're on site or how much they're using it. So we use a public-link QR code. It makes the forms accessible to everybody on your sites without managing who has a license, whether it's used, and whether you need to buy more. That's a cost element too.

Sinead Gaines25:57

All you need is a phone. In the background we have lists and approval lists that we maintain, so when someone applies for a permit and selects the site, it goes straight to the right people. We have boards and posters on site, and when we award a contractor we send a pack with all the links, so people at desks can use them too. Our own staff and anyone with a license have all the forms in the app.

Niamh Lordan26:45

It's so practical: a simple idea that's helped you get adoption and buy-in, because you've made it easy for people to access what they need to get their job done.

Niamh Lordan26:56

Data is king, and we're all trying to get as much real-time data as we can to make smarter decisions. Can you talk us through the KPIs you're now able to measure?

Sinead Gaines27:25

FlowForma produces a PDF of the form and files it to the folder structure you set up. Our supervisors still see the same form they're familiar with, and that's what they loved: the process didn't change and the end result was still there. A lot of our supervisors aren't phone-friendly and were daunted by going digital, but they love it now. It's super simple.

Sinead Gaines28:11

We use Power BI and build all our own dashboards from the data. Because we own the data and have full access to it, we can build a dashboard any way we want. Our SBO dashboard has about 12 tabs. If a client wants specific indicators for their project, we build a dashboard for that client, so our project management team isn't chasing figures and reformatting them.

Sinead Gaines29:02

When people have ideas, we improve as we go. For example, we broke our SBO data down into high, medium and low risk, because even a couple of high-risk observations carry far greater potential. We can look at correlations with contractors and at relationships between data at different points in time. A lot of off-the-shelf tools give you surface data. We want the flexibility to slice and dice it any way we want, and owning our data and building our own dashboards gives us that.

Niamh Lordan30:07

You can collect whatever data you want in the forms, validated however you want, and all of it is available for any new KPI you need to track.

Sinead Gaines30:20

We've built quality control in, too. Anyone who raises a safety observation has it vetted by an EHS person, who assigns the category on their phone. It's not on the worker to categorize it, so we're not creating false trends or false stats. And if there's not enough information, or we feel a real conversation didn't happen, we pass it back. So if you're building a process, build quality into what you want from your information.

Niamh Lordan31:32

You've digitalized a lot, and you mentioned other areas on your agenda. Would you mind sharing your next steps?

Sinead Gaines31:44

Our next bugbear is audits. Going by the same priority of resources required and impact, we're reviewing all our audit questions and our audit scoring. Other tools tend to be either in place or not; we want a scoring rating based on the level of compliance we think a site is at. That's the next big project, and we're working on it already.

Niamh Lordan32:21

Thanks so much, Sinead, for sharing your story and being so open with the audience. If anyone has questions for Sinead, pop them in the chat now and we'll put some to her in the Q&A.

Niamh Lordan32:52

Time for another poll. We'd love to know where attendees are in managing their EHS processes today. Are you using mixed tools like email, Excel and some systems, without standardizing across sites? Are you partly digital, fully digital, or fully digital and looking to optimize with AI, which I know is a major next step for all organizations?

Niamh Lordan33:24

So far, people are saying partly digital, and we hear that across the board. A customer from Beaumont Hospital spoke on a recent webinar and said automation is a mountain: you're on a journey, and it's never done. What you're doing, Sinead, is really encouraging: you're following the pain, focusing on those areas and scaling that way.

Niamh Lordan34:07

Sinead has shared her story and outcomes, so here's a quick slide on FlowForma as a platform. Your people, subcontractors, processes and, if you want them, AI agents all work together, with your SLT, employees and suppliers in one platform: automated processes, reports like the ones Sinead showed us, and auto-generated documents that pull in the data captured in the field.

Niamh Lordan35:16

If you're looking at FlowForma for automation, we have an EHS accelerator pack with the most common processes people digitalize. At in-person events, people get very excited about taking pictures in the field and annotating them. We recommend organizations follow the pain and scale automation from there: Sinead has covered EHS today, but the product is used for an A to Z of processes across construction.

Niamh Lordan36:28

A couple of other customers have achieved great returns on the platform. Jimmy at Rimcus told us that as their construction company grew, FlowForma let them take on twice the number of deliverables. And Downer in New Zealand shared the hours they were saving within 18 months across processes from finance to permits. You can get ROI quickly.

Niamh Lordan37:18

If you're interested in a next step, let us know now or in the survey whether you'd like a proof of concept or a demo. With a proof of concept, much like where Sinead started, you give us a couple of processes with pain attached, our team builds them in FlowForma, and you take them back and test them in the field.

Hannah Colley38:19

We already have a few questions in. We might not get to them all, as we're coming up to the 40-minute mark, but we'll get back to you after. First: EHS is constantly changing. Sinead, how flexible are your automations for changing regulations and processes?

Sinead Gaines38:50

It's really easy. We have full access to change whatever we want, whenever we want. For client-specific projects, such as utilities or facilities with their own rules, we build those rules into the permit, so when a permit is raised for that project the extra questions come up automatically. If we have an incident or a near miss and change or add a process, we can do that as we see fit. Some off-the-shelf tools claimed they could do that, but when we asked people who used them, it wasn't that simple.

Hannah Colley39:58

Another question for Sinead: can different sites have variations of the same process?

Sinead Gaines40:04

Absolutely. We have one permit, but if they select riser, a completely different set of questions comes up; select another option and another set appears, using show and hide rules. We've also developed clash lists, so project managers can check what's on the clash list before they approve a permit.

Sinead Gaines40:50

Projects differ, too. On a 10-story building, area owners only care about permits on their floor, so we added locations to the subject line. When someone selects their site, all the locations for that site come up from a list we manage, so one permit can vary from site to site.

Hannah Colley41:39

A question for Niamh: how does FlowForma integrate with tools construction companies already use?

Niamh Lordan41:46

Integrations are one of the first things people ask about when they're evaluating. We have out-of-the-box connectors for the main systems organizations use, such as ERP, Dynamics and Procore, so you can connect them together.

Hannah Colley42:10

How do you ensure the data being submitted is accurate?

Sinead Gaines42:18

You have to build quality into your process. The SBO is a classic example: it has to be vetted before it continues to where the data goes. It's a simple check, assign a category and off it goes; when we timed it, it took less than two seconds. We avoid vetting steps where we can, because we're trying to reduce admin. We also introduced pass-back for entries that weren't good enough, and that has driven up the standard we expect coming in.

Hannah Colley43:41

We're slightly over time, but we'll take two more. Sinead, how has this automation initiative improved audit readiness?

Sinead Gaines44:01

Hugely, for plant and permits. We thought we were compliant, and it's driven compliance up. With our dashboards, I know what condition a site is in before I even get there. If expired items are showing, I'll call and ask: is that on site or off site? If it's not on site, get it off and keep your dashboard clean. Sites have full visibility of their projects, instead of cumbersome spreadsheets and paperwork.

Sinead Gaines44:58

We also have a separate defects dashboard. On a paper inspection, someone had to note a defect and follow it up. Now every defect goes automatically to a defects list, and our plant manager checks it every other day and contacts the contractor, so defects on equipment get resolved.

Hannah Colley45:29

One last question: does the platform work on mobile devices and tablets on site? Niamh, could you take that one?

Niamh Lordan45:40

Yes, we have a mobile app customers can use on phones and tablets. And as Sinead said, you can put QR codes up in factories, data centers or wherever you are, so employees and subcontractors can get to their forms quickly.

Hannah Colley46:01

That's all we can answer right now; we'll get back to anyone else. You can choose your next steps in the post-webinar survey: schedule a tailored demo or book a free proof of concept with our team. Thank you so much for joining us, and thanks to Niamh and Sinead.

Niamh Lordan46:34

Thanks, Sinead, for being so open and sharing all your information. You and the team are doing a brilliant job.

Sinead Gaines46:41

Thank you.