Health and safety sorted

Health and safety sorted

A University of Canterbury student-developed company is helping the construction industry better work through health and safety incidents on the spot.

SiteSorted, set up by engineering students Matt Cobham and Ashok Fernandez, is a web application that allows workers in the construction industry to report health and safety incidents to the office from a construction site in real time.

The application can be accessed from almost any device that can browse the internet, which means it can be used by site workers on their existing mobile devices.
Cobham says the support and interest from industry has been overwhelming.

“Most recently, we attended an infrastructure sector conference run by some of the largest and most respected associations in the industry.

“We did a live demo at the conference to show the attendees what our current system can do, and had a tremendous amount of positive feedback about the direction we are taking with our product.”

SiteStored ran a trial with Worthing Contracting, who had been searching for a software solution for some time, to see what improvements SiteSorted would have on a real construction site.

“During the trial site workers spent no more than a minute filling out the smart form, and all events reported were actioned within the hour and closed within a day,” says Cobham.

“The average time for completing a paper-based health and a safety form on site was around 10-20 minutes, and after the paper work was done it took a further one to three days to complete an investigation and close the event out.

“As the SiteSorted smart form took less time to fill out, the number of incidents reported by workers on site went up by 200 percent.”

Cobham says he and Fernandez wanted to make a tool that made it easy to manage construction sites.

“We want SiteSorted to become the industry standard in managing construction sites. We want to reduce the amount of effort it takes to ensure sites are compliant with safety standards and, most importantly, make the sites managed by SiteSorted as safe as possible.

“We hope to expand into overseas markets in the future, to tackle issues faced on worksites around the world. We believe that the technology we’ve developed will be easily adaptable for the different compliance standards of foreign markets. We are excited to see where this can go.”

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