Contractor Management 101: Everything you need to know

Contractor management is the process and workflows a company uses to manage outsourced work and contract workers according to their standards, as well as standards set by the laws of the country in which they operate.

• Prequalification of contractor companies, pre-vetting and checks on their health and safety information, insurance documentation, quality & safety accreditations and policies. This involves ongoing management of this information as well as regular reviews of risk and incident history.
• Managing the job order or project and communicating expectations and requirements of the job.
• Obtaining risk assessments, method statements (RAMS) and safety plans from contractors who have been invited to do said work.
• Obtaining details on what workers or subcontractors the contractor will be sending to complete works.
• Inductions. Inducting those workers and subcontractors with any relevant site or project inductions and ensuring they have seen and agreed to any site rules and safe systems of work required.
• Contractor and worker competency review; validate any training or skill certifications, licences and qualifications, to confirm workers are competent to complete the required job.
• Check-in and record access and egress on site with a final check on compliance and whether contractor are validated to work. Issue of passes and badges to evidence this, and enable regular challenge / spot checks of external contractors working on site.
• Issuing of permits to work for high-risk works, encompassing dynamic risk assessment of the job and job location.
• Monitoring of works, with regular safety checks and audits, that are recorded and retrievable.
• Recording and reporting on any accidents, near-misses or incidents.
• Ongoing awareness of who is on site, doing what and where to enable a recognition of any potential clashes.
• Performance management of contractors, their workers and subcontractors, with a process for recording site bans or misconduct to inform future resourcing.
• Checking job or project completion and ensuring the safety of the site when work has stopped. Ensuring any permits have been properly closed/cancelled.
• Ongoing verification of approved or preferred supplier register, validating that insurances and documentation aren’t expired and are kept up to date for key contractors, to ensure the smooth running of operations.
  

Any company using contractors has health and safety responsibilities to those contractors as well as to any staff, visitors or clients that may be affected by the activities of that contractor when on site

There are still many organisations that manually manage this process through use of email, spreadsheets to track expiries on documentation and contractor competencies, paper sign-in books and triplicate permit to work pads.

• Assure by Evotix
• Alcumus
• SkyVisitor
• Sinica
• Biosite Systems
• Verature (find out why Verature is the best in class solution to automate your contractor management process here.)
  

• Manual paper-based systems lack efficiency, control & security, leaving you vulnerable to corruption & lost data. The are extremely susceptible to human error and are resistant to consolidation & merging, meaning gaining a real-time overview of the complete picture, or collating data for reporting, is often difficult, if not impossible.

• Instead, using a system, data is secured behind login settings & user permissions, archived & retrievable. A good system will be adaptable for your workflows & to meet changing requirements in contractor compliance, ensuring procedural compliance at all times. While in-built workflows and mandatory fields and forms ensure standardised data input, with alerts& escalations processes removing the risk of human error when performing compliance checks.
• Managing the process and all your data in one central cloud-based system helps ensure you’ve the information you need, where it comes to performing compliance checks, resourcing future jobs, performing on job safety audits or proving due diligence to an external auditor.
  

• Contractor onboarding process: create your compliant approved contractor list. Send out a digital questionnaire to capture the documents and compliance evidence you require, with built-in approvals, to help streamline this process.
• Automated renewal reminders mean your contractors are responsible for remaining compliant. No more manually requesting, and manually chasing, free up your time to focus on what counts.
• Project & job bookings: book jobs, manage sub-contractors and workers, and review job credentials and progress on a job digital dashboard. Stop scrambling to get hold of those last-minute job credentials. Gain more visibility on compliance at job-level than ever before so you can be one step ahead.
• Self-service contractor portal: contractors can answer to the job requirements, easily upload RAMS and other worker competencies to an external portal. Any documentation will be stored securely against the job. Forget those paper RAMS and documents lost in inboxes, with a centralised system where the contractors are responsible for uploading documents and details about their team and any subcontractors, directly where you expect them to be.
• Inductions & Assessments: share your induction and assessments via the portal. With an induction dashboard to keep track of contractor passes and fails. Make manually inducting that queue of contractors sat at reception a thing of the past. Digitalise and share your induction and assessment pre-visit so contractors are safe BEFORE they arrive on site.
• Approvals & Workflows- your staff can verify credentials with Verature’s in-built approvals and workflows process, ensuring compliance before a contractor is approved for that job and to attend site. Prevent cutting corners and uncertainty that processes are being followed, with mandatory approvals and workflows built into your Verature system. Ensure nothing has been missed, every time.
• Multi-site Check-In: contractors, visitors and even staff can clock-in through a reception-less sign-in at any of your access points across your multiple sites. Our Self-Service Mobile Check-In together with digital badges means no need for expensive hardware and paper waste! Avoid additional resource and be in more than one place at one time.
• Permits & Passes Tracking: track the issue and return of permits, keys – any items you manage. Reporting and querying functions enable you to audit items issued across sites, locations and times. Remove paper and spreadsheets, make audits quick and easy and keep track of those items you don’t want to lose.
• Digital Permits, Permit Audit and Check – replicate your paper permits in digital format, including digital signatures, checks and approvals. Perform on site audits, attach documents and snap and attach images from any mobile or portable device.
• Contractor performance management – Red and Yellow cards, and site bans enable the recording of non-compliances or incidents, to help make better informed decisions resourcing future jobs.
• Permit mapping functionality – permits issued will be plotted on your site map or a google map, helping to identify potential clashes in high-risk works.