“You have to be capable of quickly changing in our industry and GoFormz is allowing us to do that.”
GOFORMZ CASE STUDY
AT-A-GLANCE
Roadbridge, a GoFormz customer since 2014, needed a way to capture COVID-19 health screening information from employees, as well as subcontractors, security, and site visitors not within their GoFormz account.
Roadbridge leveraged digital forms to streamline their COVID-19 pandemic response and procedures, allowing management to efficiently and thoroughly screen personnel and visitors prior to job site entry, as well as effectively implement audits of high-risk areas, like canteens. Using the Public Forms feature, Roadbridge can easily share digital health screening forms with site visitors and employees returning to work, allowing their team to screen and approve visitors prior to their arrival.
THE FULL STORY
Roadbridge is an Irish Civil Engineering firm that operates in many global locations including Ireland, the UK, Qatar, and New Caledonia in the South Pacific. Their projects include motorways, wind farms, golf courses, water schemes, site developments and gas pipelines. The majority of their work is carried out in remote areas, often with poor or no mobile coverage.
Roadbridge originally began their digital transformation with GoFormz by digitizing their site inspections, safety checklists, and other daily construction forms. As the COVID-19 pandemic began its rapid spread across the globe, Roadbridge found even more ways to leverage GoFormz to help their team. “Part of our duty as management within our company is prioritizing employee safety, and in order to do that, we have to communicate efficiently with them,” explained Ivan Conway, Quality and Environmental Manager for Roadbridge. “And we’re talking about large numbers of employees across various different sites. So how do you do that effectively while maintaining social distancing?”
Responsible for the wellbeing of hundreds of employees, subcontractors, and other personnel, Roadbridge management rapidly created a COVID-19 taskforce of several managers as well as the managing director, to put into place procedures to prevent the spread of the virus across their sites and limit employee exposure. These procedures included remote work during Ireland’s eight week lockdown period, as well as vigilant health screenings and audits across job sites. This process was made complicated by the very nature of their work; how do you comply with social distancing measures and limit exposure while sharing tools and worksites?
For example, toolbox talks are completed regularly at job sites, requiring around a dozen Roadbridge employees to gather, discuss that day’s tasks, and sign off that they had attended – the most common task, made seemingly impossible by the risks of gathering in person and sharing a device, paper, or pen. “So how do we do this without exposing people to the risks involved with COVID-19? The answer for us was GoFormz.”
“We preach safety first. Always do it the safe way,” Ivan explained. “Well, this was our time to lead this from a safety-first point of view… let’s get this to peoples’ devices and computers, so they don’t have to interact with anyone else, the information comes to them automatically and use a device that no one else is handling.”
Roadbridge’s GoFormz implementation team created several digital forms to support the preventative measures necessary to protect their staff, including health screening questionnaires for job site visitors, timesheets for remote workers, and regular audits of shared workspaces. Because these forms needed to be utilized by both Roadbridge personnel as well as external contributors (e.g. subcontractors, onsite security, etc.) Ivan leveraged the Public Forms feature, which allows GoFormz users to share links to their digital forms for individuals outside of the Roadbridge GoFormz account to fill out and complete.
“We introduced questionnaires for people returning to work, in relation to COVID-19,” Ivan explained. “So for delivery drivers who visit the site, we can circulate this questionnaire with all the standard COVID-19 questions, before they even visit the site.” These questionnaires asked visitors if they had experienced any flu-like symptoms, had a fever, visited a COVID-19 hotspot, and more. “We were able to manage that information coming in, trace it back to the people for that particular project and approve them, and then have it routed to our security teams at their various different sites to allow entry into the project.” These completed forms are also uploaded to the integrated Roadbridge Box account.
“Once they hit complete on that form, that form then goes to the designated person who can reopen the form and hit complete once they have signed off. That then uploads to our Box account and is routed to our security team.”
Ivan also crafted a digital audit to be used throughout shared Roadbridge workspaces, such as canteens. “We had new cleaning regimes put in place using GoFormz to monitor the cleaning regimes and ensure they took place.” These audits asked onsite personnel to verify that protective measures, like hand sanitizer stations, were present throughout these high-risk areas. “We can put everything we need into an audit. We then get confirmation that these tasks have been completed for fifteen different projects, by that audit coming back in, along with the photos input as evidence of those tasks being completed,” Ivan explained. “We can then run a report showing that this week we had fifteen audits done, fourteen answered ‘yes’ for a particular task, and one of them noted that a hand sanitizer needs to be replaced.” This auditing process has granted Roadbridge management increased visibility into COVID-19 preventative measures being completed onsite.
For Roadbridge, GoFormz has helped their team accomplish far more than simply time and budget savings. “We went into an eight-week lockdown here in Ireland,” Ivan explained. “And we had things implemented before that lockdown began, including documents and procedures that other companies were forced to implement after the lockdown in order to get back up and running. That really helped us. Rather than having an onslaught of documents and policies to be done by a date – we had a lot of that done before it was required.”
This allowed Roadbridge to stay significantly ahead of their competition, and ahead of the curve. “GoFormz has been one of the enablers to allow us to be successful in these efforts.”
With 135 employees now using GoFormz, Roadbridge has also experienced significant time savings across their operation, due to digital data capture. With GoFormz, Roadbridge has digitized 60-80% of its data capture, allowing more complete data to be processed at more regular intervals. “You have to be capable of quickly changing in our industry and GoFormz is allowing us to do that.