This year has thrown a wealth of unexpected challenges at the food industry, as the ability to deliver service as normal has been disrupted for all. But Compass Group PLC faced its own challenges to ensure that its health and safety measures across the board met the high standards that the company strives for.
Compass Group is the world’s leading food service company. It operates in around 45 countries, employs and engages around 600,000 people and serves over 5.5 billion meals a year. The group specialises in providing food and a range of support services across the core sectors of Business and Industry, Healthcare and Seniors, Education, Sports and Leisure and Defence, Offshore and Remote.
The company employed Totalmobile, leading innovator in field service management and mobile workforce software solutions, to develop a mobile app to power the firm’s digitised Safety Walks programme and ultimately improve the health and safety measures in place worldwide.
The challenge
“As part of Compass Group’s health and safety processes, area managers would often conduct safety walks when they would visit the locations where they run catering and other food services,” explained Nick Jeffreys, MD of Property and Facilities Management at Totalmobile. “The purpose would be to ensure that each location was maintaining the company’s high standards in kitchen cleanliness, minimising health hazards, etc. But even though this work was being carried out, the company didn’t have a method in place for reporting this activity.”
The solution
Compass Group selected Totalmobile’s Mobilise solution with a custom configuration to improve its Safety Walks programme.
Mobilise is a mobile workforce management solution that empowers staff to capture intelligent data and access the key information required to deliver services efficiently, first time. Providing a native application that can work on any device or operating system, Mobilise provides staff with all the information they require to complete their work efficiently. Crucially, Mobilise integrates with all existing systems, enabling information to be seamlessly passed between the solution and various record systems. This ensures staff can access all of the information they require regardless of where it is stored, and when jobs are completed, back office systems are updated with all of the information captured in real-time.
To date, Totalmobile’s solution has been rolled out by Compass Group to 2,500 users in 25 countries around the globe, all using the solution to plan, deliver and follow-up on between five and ten safety walks per user per month. Committed to the highest standards of health and safety, the specially-designed solution has enabled Compass Group to build on its ‘See Care Share’ model and provide its leadership teams with a highly structured way of conducting safety walks when visiting manufacturing or production sites.
The mobile application, which is fully integrated with Microsoft Outlook’s diary, prompts users to plan and undertake a number of monthly planned safety walks. Once on site, the solution features a series of tailored workflows that guide users through how to conduct a safety walk and schedule post-walk follow-ups. The solution makes use of different functionality within Totalmobile including forms, folio, visits, bulletins and web-admin reports. Compass Group is now able to use three safety walk forms, all available in English and translated to ten further languages, which includes Spanish, German, French, Japanese and Portuguese.
The benefits
“The Totalmobile app has enabled Compass Group to automate practices that encourage conversations between leaders and unit team members on safety and any areas of concern,” said Federico Tonetti, Global Health and Safety Director at Compass Group. “We are now able to ensure these walks are undertaken in a standardised manner across the globe and that all findings and follow-up actions are captured, recorded and actioned, so that nothing is ever overlooked or forgotten.”
Featuring dashboards that can be customised to individual user requirements, the mobile app enables users to capture and record their observations in real-time, identify actions and checks for future review and record the entire walk journey as it is undertaken through the premises. In addition to maintaining a record of every walk undertaken, complete with photographs, the solution also enables Compass to automatically schedule actions to address any safety issues observed during a walk around. Using this software system has allowed Compass to ensure all employees are compliant and meeting their set safety requirements.
Tonetti continued: “We wanted a solution that would support our leaders to proactively participate with colleagues in a way that promotes joint problem solving and resolution in a timely way. Maintaining the highest standards of safety performance is a top priority for our organisation. This system enables us to monitor compliance KPIs with local and international regulations electronically and with full transparency – as well as identifying any potential improvements that will enable us to stay ahead of an evolving global safety agenda.
“Having the ability to conduct safety walks in a highly structured and consistent manner has made it easier to quickly search out potential safety issues and automate resolution efforts to the benefit of customers and employees.”
Jim Darragh, CEO of Totalmobile, concludeds: “In creating a cloud-based mobile digital data capture tool, we’ve enabled Compass Group to automate much of the safety walk, the follow-up and reporting in real-time. The different locations around the world that Compass operated in were previously running separately to each other – now, the tool that manages safety across the business is consistent and compliant across the globe. This was one of the key elements for meeting and maintaining Compass’ high standards, and with the Totalmobile Mobilise app, the business can ensure all locations are working in harmony.”
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