WHS MONITOR™ sows seeds of progress with Pacific Seeds
Without a centralised system, HMR drilling was finding it difficult to keep on top of its WHS compliance requirements. In need of a new approach, the company found the solution in WHS MONITOR™.
Two years ago when Iain Martin-Blakey took on the role of HR and WHS Lead in Australia for Pacific Seeds – a prominent provider of crop solutions for the agricultural sector – what he found was not uncommon in terms of its processes around risk, incident, asset and HR safety management.
“The company was using a lot of paper-based systems, which were quite cumbersome,” Iain said.
“Basically the processes involved people going around with clipboards, making notes, ticking boxes and then imputing the details into spreadsheets before making reports and recommendations.”
Pacific Seeds is primarily a broadacre seed manufacturer that produces seeds at its own farming facility in Toowoomba while also sourcing product from licenced farms. The company then cleans, grades and distributes the seeds to clients Australia-wide.
“The WHS MONITOR™ package is also cost effective. Once up and running and configured, it means less time is required to be spent on compliance, freeing up people’s time to work on other areas of the business”
Iain Martin-Blakey, HR & WHS Lead, Pacific Seeds
Given the breadth of working situations Pacific Seeds is exposed to, from general farming involving the day to day operation of plant and machinery, as well as the use of processing equipment and management of chemicals including, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides, its operational environment is complex.
Despite this, Iain believed that there was a better way of managing the various workplace procedures, and that there would be benefits in further growing a culture at the company of inclusiveness and raising safety awareness.
“I found that a lot of the responsibility for workplace safety was being left to too few. I wanted others to get on board and take greater responsibility – I wanted everybody to do their bit and become more involved,” he said.
How Pacific Seeds utilise WHS Monitor
With this mindset, Iain began looking for a platform or system that would let the company reach this goal. Having looked at what was available in the market, including platforms such as iAuditor, he came to the conclusion that these were just not suitable for Pacific Seeds.
“We wanted a centralised system that would be available Australia-wide, an umbrella system capable of providing all of our requirements in one,” Iain said.
Incorporating eight core units comprised of a total of 120 unique, integrated modules, as well as an extensive proprietary database, WHS MONITOR™ enables organisations to simply and effectively comply with their WHS obligations.
The system uses a live feed of its aggregated safety data, along with further information provided by the individual client, the system automatically and seamlessly creates customised WHS and Project Management Plans in real time.
“Pacific Seeds has been using all eight modules provided by WHS MONITOR™ for 18 months now and we are very pleased with what it’s given us – I’m confident that we’ll get even more benefits out of it in the months ahead. And actually, we’re now focusing on institutionalising the system company-wide,” Iain said.
“I didn’t want to implement a ‘veneer’ safety and compliance system, I wanted something that was both deep and wide.”
According to Iain, as well as involving a larger number of Pacific Seeds’ staff in taking greater ownership of risk management, safety compliance and related, the system’s ease of use means that previous processes that were only undertaken haphazardly because of the time taken, are now being closely overseen.
“The process of compliance and safety can be onerous, but WHS MONITOR™ makes it faster and easier – we now have much tighter and safer systems based on WHS,” he said.
“The WHS MONITOR™ package is also cost effective. Once up and running and configured, it means less time is required to be spent on compliance, freeing up people’s time to work on other areas of the business.”
Another benefit of WHS MONITOR™ Iain explained, is the level of advice, support and customisation that comes with the package.
“We’re over the moon with the support that the WHS MONITOR™ team have provided us, it’s been very thorough and the response to all of our requests and questions has been quick,” he said.
“I’m really looking forward to progressing the use of the system at Pacific Seeds in the coming months.”
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