Risk Assessments, Going Digital

What are the benefits of switching to a fully automated digital platform?

When it comes to conducting a risk assessment, the principles are simple enough.
In theory, there are 5 steps:

1. Identify the hazard
2. Determine who may be harmed and how
3. Evaluate the risk and take precautions
4. Record the findings
5. Review and update as necessary

For smaller organisations, this is barely manageable to achieve using paper-based or templated computer documents. The real difficulty lies in record keeping and audit trails for the larger organisation. As an organisation grows, it becomes more challenging to maintain consistency, standardise the approach, keep track of who’s doing what, and centrally store all related documentation.

Trying to assimilate meaningful reporting and build real-time dashboards to establish consistent oversight and control from a plethora of disparate systems, devices and data stores is both time consuming and technically challenging. Switching to a fully automated digital platform to manage this is essential in this day and age; the problem is identifying the best one to use.

View our Risk Assessment Template Examples.

The Challenge

Today’s challenge is firmly rooted in the numbers. The more employees, contractors, and clients, and the bigger you are, the more significant the problem.

Imagine running a team of Risk Assessors who all like to do their own thing across multiple Risk Types. This means that they document and report differently, rendering much of the data received as inconsistent and therefore difficult, if not impossible, to compare on a like for like basis across different risk areas, buildings, or even entire estates. Bringing all this information together on time and in a meaningful format is simply too hard, costly, and logistically unsustainable as your business grows.

Documents get saved and stored across multiple devices, systems, and servers, resulting in the potential for human error, data losses and difficulty finding or collating related Risk Assessment information, not to mention how you capture and line up the increasing amount of related imagery (floor plans and photographs), which is now required. This also presents challenges when reusing assessment data for future re-assessment purposes.

Finally, there is the importance of managing your QA and the process by which you securely communicate your risk assessments and supporting evidence to your clients without creating and managing a vast volume of email data. The pitfalls are endless, as is the time it consumes, not to mention the cost of administering all this!

The Digital Solution

What if you had a unified digital risk assessment solution covering all of your required property risk types? A solution that provides out-of-the-box, pre-configured and editable Risk Type templates (e.g. PAS 79, Fire Door Survey, asbestos, legionella or COVID-19), or the capability to simply create your own bespoke assessment types and versions. Would a digital cloud solution make your life easier? Imagine if you could input Risk Assessment hazards, actions, and images on-site via a mobile app, working on or off-line, which automatically syncs to your cloud account. An App that is compatible with both iOS and Android.

With Risk Warden, you can have all this and a lot more. Our solution is a fully customisable Risk Assessment software platform, which comes ready to use out-of-the-box. Capture hazards, findings, and actions and document these using prepopulated responses or simply use free-text with the option of voice to text input. Achieve data consistency by specifying mandatory data input fields and capturing relevant photographic evidence where required. You can even add your corporate branding to your User Interface (UI), to your email correspondence (sent via the platform), as well as to every assessment PDF.

Your UI branding also extends to what your customer’s see on their portal, giving you added brand presence and keeping your brand and services at the forefront of your customer’s minds.

Other notable benefits of going digital and switching to the Risk Warden Risk Assessment platform include:

Preconfigured Templates:

• Pre-set findings and actions – Use our pre-configured finding pre-sets or simply add your own. This makes the inputting of on-site findings and actions faster and more efficient, thus saving your assessors time and increasing consistency of terminology in your reporting.
• Assessment information templates – Outline what you want to capture as part of your assessment. Wave goodbye to those countless hours spent re-entering the same data over and over by adding placeholders to auto-populate information from estate components, saving you time.
• Environment templates – Standardise your qualitative risk analysis and define which hazards need to be captured for specific environments, creating and enforcing a consistent and methodical approach. If you have a client that requires their assessments to be carried out in a particular way, this can be easily achieved with little or no disruption

Customer Portal:

• Give your customers access to a digital portal that can be used to view their assessments and then use the data you have provided to do much more in managing their Risk and Compliance.
• Your clients can then manage their assessments and easily convert the Risk Actions you have flagged within the Risk Assessments you supply into actionable tasks.
• Your clients can convert your static Risk Assessment into a ‘living document’, which automatically updates and shows their real-time Risk Management position as their staff and contractors complete each of the actions you defined.
• Your clients can also add an unlimited number of Estate Components, including Assets and then track their Compliance Management status. This includes the validity of all compliance-related assessments an documentation.

Collaborative Capabilities:

• Invite others to assist with specific parts of any risk assessment process, for example, a third-party specialist assessor. Their contributions will be fully tracked, and they will be added as a contributor to the Risk Assessment.

Re-Assessment

• Never lose track of re-assessment dates, thanks to an inbuilt diary that can be set to automatically remind both the assessor and your customer.
• Fast-track the re-assessment process by automatically populating relevant historical assessment data, thus eliminating the time-consuming overhead of re-inputting this data from scratch.
• Historical hazards, findings and actions are automatically archived, preserving the immutable audit trail.

Assessment Scheduling

• Schedule assessments using the calendar function and assign them to the appropriate risk assessor to complete.
• Assessments can be linked to the assessable area. The assigned assessor can simply click one button to create the new assessment, which is automatically populated with relevant information about the assessable area, saving time, removing the need to re-key data and thus eliminating the potential for human error.

Validation of QA Process

• Risk Warden has designed this functionality to underpin your Quality Assurance (QA) process and satisfy specific regulations that require your Risk Assessments to be validated to remain compliant, i.e., BAFE

In summary, Risk Warden delivers a vast range of time-saving features thanks to its rich functionality and best-of-breed cloud platform. It enables Risk Assessment companies to quickly and efficiently enhance their Risk Assessment processes and methodologies to meet growing customer demands driven by constant regulatory change and today’s increasingly sophisticated customer landscape.

Experience how the platform can reinforce your assessment processes, accelerate on-site assessment, optimise data consistency, and unlock the power of real-time dashboards and on-demand reporting. Understand how Risk Warden is helping organisations like yours to operate ever more efficiently and remain compliant at the forefront of the UK’s rapidly evolving regulatory landscape.

Request your 1:1 demo with a member of our sales team or simply sign up today to get immediate hands-on access to the platform and your own free Risk Warden account.

What is a Risk Management Plan? Find out here.