Case Study: Health & Safety

The system is implemented as a web application for various reasons. One of these is that it eliminates the need to install software on the users’ computers.

The web application replaces an older desktop client application. The corresponding server system is unchanged, and the web application interfaces to the server in the same way as the old client.

We host the web application in a commercial data centre on behalf of our customer. This relieves our customer’s IT department of all maintenance and support workload.

Administrative staff in our customer’s organisation perform all back–office work, using an administrator module. This includes provisioning new users, maintaining hotel registrations, and uploading and downloading questionnaires.

An external audit of the system, commissioned by our customer, concluded that it “performs better than most commercial applications in the market.” The auditors went on, in their review of their own testing, to remark that “it is a testament to the simplicity of the application that most testers could conduct the test even without training.”

Every quarter our customer prepares and uploads a new questionnaire. The hotel managers answer the questions and then submit the completed questionnaire.

The system guarantees the integrity of a manager’s answers in several ways. It won’t accept a questionnaire until the manager has answered all questions, so our customer knows that the manager has considered all issues and hasn’t just submitted a copy of last quarter’s questionnaire. And because the system manages the questionnaires, including submission and archiving, the hotel manager knows that he’s working on the current one. He can’t get mixed up and fill in last quarter’s again by mistake, or fill in this quarter’s but return last quarter’s.

If the manager answers any question in the negative, the system prompts him to define a corrective action plan and assign it to a named employee. The system then automatically emails the plan details to that employee. The manager can print the complete list of action plans.

After the hotel manager has submitted his questionnaire, our customer pushes a button and the system loads it into an analysis and reporting system.

At all times the hotel manager has access to his full history of archived questionnaires. Regional managers have full visibility of all their hotels’ questionnaires.

The principal objective of this system was to facilitate improved compliance with regulatory and insurance obligations. The system achieves this by simplifying the hotels’ workflow and improving the integrity of the data.

Other improvements to the business process became possible when we replaced the old email–based system with this new online system. For example, a hotel manager can now track progress on corrective actions, and can perform analyses that identify shortcomings in the hotel’s OH&S practices.

An independent review of the system, commissioned by our customer, commented that “it is a testament to the simplicity of the application that most testers could conduct the test even without training.”