4 Ways Mobility Can Improve Your Safety Strategy and Add Business Value

Best-in-Class companies operating today believe that delivering high-quality products is as important as successfully managing a policy around environmental protection and operational health and safety (EHS). The success of a business depends, in no small measure, on the people driving it forward on a day-to-day basis: their well-being is paramount, not only in ethical terms, but also in “making-or-breaking” a company’s bottom line.

Mobility has a crucial role to play where business, environment, health and safety converge. This is especially the case when we focus on issues concerning ‘safety in the workplace’, where tools such as mobile applications can be the perfect medium to upgrade your safety strategy. Most people will just associate mobility to notions of using a “mobile device”, but in the current corporate context, mobility doesn’t boil down to a smartphone, it’s an architecture you can build around (and for) your employees, and which you can modulate to best suit your needs. Specifically, in your own company, mobility will likely take the form of smart software solutions that offer a platform for employee proactivity, while synchronizing with databases and systems you may already have in place.

Among its many benefits and advantages, here are 4 specific ways in which mobility can improve your safety strategy and bring added value to your business:

1. MOBILITY SAVES LIVES

With over 6 billion mobile devices worldwide and 80% of employees using personal technology for business use, the tangible benefits of embracing mobility are huge, one of the most relevant being increased employee well-being. In case of an incident or potentially dangerous event, mobility can save lives and put a stop to further physical and material damage. Users can help each other stay safe by sharing and exchanging data in real-time, posting warnings, photos or even videos and alerting each other of potentially perilous situations as they happen or even before they occur. If a fire breaks out at one of your plants, for instance, mobility will reinforce mechanical safety systems such as alarms by allowing employees to immediately report the emergency and send out an evacuation alert to coworkers in real-time.

2. MOBILITY INCREASES PRODUCTIVITY

Another positive aspect that mobility will bring to your safety strategy is increased levels of productivity. Aided by user friendly interfaces requiring little to no training, employees are able to save time by shelving time-consuming, bureaucratic and inefficient data-entry tasks in favour of dedicating time and energy to areas of business that had previously lacked attention. In addition, mobility will further streamline operations by helping avoid human mistakes in data entry and facilitating quick, ‘on the go’ database updating (even offline or when employees are out-of-office).

3. MOBILITY WILL BOOST YOUR OPERATING MARGIN

Embracing mobility – versus ‘pre-mobility’ – translates into three benefits that inevitably go hand-in-hand: With solutions allowing employees to share safety tips and alerts (and report near-misses, incidents and observations), businesses can expect to see lower average injury frequency rates. By stepping in before accidents and material damages happen, corporations will also experience increased overall equipment effectiveness, and, thanks to the combination of averted EHS risks and smoother technical operations, this will result in increased operating margins.

4. MOBILITY MEANS ENHANCED COMMUNICATION AND DATA ACCESS

Mobility can be summarized into the mantra “right data, right place, right time”. As much as 41% of companies can’t access data when they need it, especially as it often becomes trapped and isolated in the extended supply chain. In addition, mobility is first and foremost synonym of improved communication – for instance between key actors in your global supply chain or, more simply, between employees at head-quarters and those in the field (or yet, among workers operating in different spaces within the same plant or factory).

Mobility opens the doors to a truly integrated and consistently updated system (which goes beyond the automated collection of data), allowing for a more agile workflow, improved communication, better tracking and a more adaptive approach to management and decision-making.

TO PUT FIGURES INTO WORDS, HERE ARE 10 STATISTICS FROM AN ABERDEEN REPORT THAT WILL HELP YOU BETTER UNDERSTAND MOBILE SAFETY: http://bit.ly/1Jx9R7J

In this report , the Aberdeen Group showcases how mobility can be a powerful ally in leveraging an already great EHS policy and exactly how Best-in-Class companies succeed in embedding a culture of safety into their operations (while maximizing the resulting tangible benefits).

Based on the experiences of 175 manufacturers and their mobile operations, the content of this report dispels the misconception that safety and operational excellence do not mix. Because safety concerns every single person within your organization, this report will offer a clear roadmap enabling you to convert mere safety compliance (too often regarded as a nuisance) into an asset and a cornerstone of your business. The report details how your company can integrate safety through mobility while adding value to your bottom line, as well as outlining what Best-in-Class companies are doing to excel where mobility and EHS overlap (e.g. what’s helping them break away from the pack?). In addition, you will also learn about how exactly your business can integrate a new mobility strategy and the KPIs you need to track for to best monitor your progress.

In conclusion, a good mobility strategy is all about increasing efficiency and cutting corners the smart way. It will allow your business to operate more smoothly, safely and with enhanced communication and coordination at all levels.

To read the full report visit www.enablon.com or follow this link: http://bit.ly/1oFOVOB