As soon as your company becomes involved with ‘working with third parties’, a multitude of extra tasks and responsibilities arise. You are ‘working with third parties’ as soon as you call on someone from outside (employees from another company) to carry out work activities at your work site(s). Examples include the maintenance of buildings, the installation of machinery etc.
Since the Well-being at Work Act imposes obligations on the principal, you should search for a tool or another way of tracking these tasks. We will try to present the basic principles to you in phases and explain them based on the VARIO management system.
Phase 1: Preparation
In the first phase, you will search for a suitable contractor. When making this choice, you should also consider safety-related issues and parameters. The following items are addressed in this phase:
Submission of a Declaration of Intent: In this document, the contractor states his details and declares his responsibility for compliance with the HSE requirements. In the accompanying questionnaire, the contractor may indicate whether or not he is in possession of a VCA/ISO certificate. If not, then he must complete the questionnaire.
Requesting and managing documentation: The contractor will provide you with all safety documentation, ranging from risk analyses to certificates. In VARIO, you can upload all these documents in a structured manner into the contractor file. This allows you to also receive a reminder when documents are about to expire.
Contractor appraisal and selection: Upon receipt of all relevant information, you can evaluate the contractors based on their safety parameters. This way you choose the most suitable and the safest contractor.
Phase 2: Communication
Good communication before and during the work activities is essential. Here are some tips:
Organize a kick-off meeting or start-up meeting before starting to work. VARIO enables correct registration including a signature list.
Another way to share information is to organize an e-learning for contractors in which you digitally send them the access instructions and/or the work site regulations, for example, followed by a test. This can also be organized and managed in VARIO.
Phase 3: Monitoring
During execution of the work, it is important to monitor the contractors. This can be done in several ways, for example by means of contractor audits, inspections, working with KPIs or objectives etc. This monitoring can be easily carried out at the work site itself using our VARIO Mobile app, which also works when offline.
Phase 4: Completion
Upon completion of the work, you can perform a completion check with the corresponding reporting. This can be done, for example, using a checklist. The final score on the completion check can be included as an objective assessment tool in the final evaluation of the contractor.
Are you interested in fully automating the process described above?
Please feel free to contact us.