A Better Way to Track Employee Licenses, Certifications and Training
Credentials are critical in managing construction projects, but keeping track of who is licensed, certified or trained for which activities is a management headache. Many contractors, like RJV Construction in Massachusetts, rely on the ONE Platform to minimize this challenge.
“Prior to using B2W Inform, our safety manager tracked all certifications, licensing and training for each employee, using paper files,” explains Matt Deluca, construction project manager at RJV. “Using the reporting engine in B2W Infrom, querying is now done in a matter of seconds instead of hours. The report tells me exactly who is licensed for what and even triggers alerts to tell me when licenses are going to expire in the next 30 days.”
Traditional ways are inefficient
Time is money. There are huge construction safety, compliance and legal risks associated with making sure employees are properly trained and credentialed to handle hazardous materials, operate specific machinery and manage specialized challenges on the jobsite, but inefficient tracking of credentials is a threat too – to productivity and profitability.
With documentation in paper personnel files, checking qualifications of a specific employee may require an extra trip to the office or a few phone calls and a manual search through those files. Generating a list of employees available and qualified for a certain activity, a common requirement, means someone has to sort through a batch of files and manually construct the list.
Spreadsheets are a little better. They provide filter and search capabilities, but maintaining them is still a time consuming, manual effort. The larger the workforce, the harder it is to keep them up to date and accurate.
There is also no way, with paper files and spreadsheets, to know in advance about expiration dates until someone checks manually. That creates a drag on the efficiency of the resource scheduling and dispatching process. Equipment may sit idle and job progress may slow or come to a halt, as a scramble ensues to find the right employees with the right credentials.
A better way with B2W
With the ONE Platform, data on licenses, certifications and training for each employee is maintained in the central B2W operational database. Like other information on employees, equipment or jobs in that database, it’s available in real time to other elements of the ONE Platform, including B2W Inform. The data can also be updated in real time via any B2W element.
Contractors like RJV can build a report in B2W Inform to query the operational database and search by location, job title, type of credentials or licenses, expiration dates – virtually any variable they choose.
They can even use B2W Inform to alert them in advance with a simple, custom report to track expired or soon-to-expire credentials. The report can be delivered automatically at specified dates, or delivery could be triggered by upcoming expiration dates. This feature helps contractors to move more proactively to keep employees licensed, certified and trained.
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