Skill-safe
the client

This customer is one of the world’s largest utility companies.

As would be expected from such a key player in utilities, the company takes professional values and practices seriously and places emphasis on success through sustaining effective relationships and fostering teamwork.

The company works closely with a number of contractors for its construction work and launched the passport scheme for its main contractors. Such has been the success of this initiative that the new scheme has been extended several times and now includes their entire supply chain.

the requirement

Seriously committed to a well-trained and competent workforce, the client was clear on what it wanted from a competence management system and commissioned Reference Point to develop a bespoke on-line solution.

What was required was a simple, yet effective, solution to undertake a number of key functions:

• To ensure that unqualified operatives cannot work on any client site
• To record and monitor all relevant training (including safety critical)
• To monitor and indicate forthcoming expiries, so that further necessary training can be planned for and delivered
• To generate Smart ID cards directly from the system
• To allow access to restricted parts of the solution by contractors – in order to keep their own records up-to-date - with overall access to the client
• To facilitate record transfer to allow operatives to move from one employer to another
• To have flexible reporting to deliver focussed, key management information

the solution

We recommended implementing our Skill-safe with the company’s own Smart Cards and adding some additional customisation to meet the company’s highly specific entry requirements for one of its high security projects. Everyone visiting site either has their own Smartcard or will be a processed as a Visitor and carded accordingly.

The database structure is sophisticated, providing a variety of access levels to a diverse group of authorised users – from client “super” users through to main contractors and their sub-contractors.

Commenting on the need for such a system, the client said: "We need to be able to ensure that only suitably trained people carry out safety critical tasks on our sites. We wanted a system that was easy to access and enabled training needs to be economically managed".