Faith Technologies Incorporated

Faith Technologies Incorporated (FTI) is a dynamic organization comprised of construction, engineering, manufacturing and renewable energy experts. They create success for their partners and team members through innovation and expertise. Here’s how SafetyCulture (formerly iAuditor) helps them drive productivity, value, and safety. 

FTI streamlines processes with digital inspections 

At the core of FTI’s mission, they’re committed to making their customers and themselves better through passion, practical solutions, and the relentless pursuit of perfection.  FTI does work across America. With safety always a priority for the organization, they began to find that their method of collecting data from dispersed jobsites across the US was limiting. FTI’s Project Managers used their own tools to conduct safety inspections and submit reports, making it difficult to easily identify the overall top hazards in the field and providing a disjointed customer experience for safety reporting. 

Senior Safety Manager, Josh Ring, serves the Northern Wisconsin region. He wanted to create a more efficient process, one that prioritized the safety of the frontline. Knowing that the old system made it difficult to solve problems quickly, and sometimes buried useful insights and data, he began looking for a solution to bring all of the inspections and data into one place. 

Josh’s team began using the SafetyCulture platform for just one type of inspection, a Field Safety Audit, across its job sites in the Northern Wisconsin region. Completed by field employees, this general audit is designed to identify hazards in the field. The goal was to create an audit that worked across all departments and projects of all sizes. Completing these inspections in SafetyCulture unlocked the ability to quickly identify hazards in the field.

Today, SafetyCulture is used by over 850 FTI team members nationwide. FTI has completed more than 64,000 inspections in SafetyCulture, saving a lot of paper in the process, and they’ve seen safety culture improve as a result. In 2020, FTI won the Associated General Contractors (AGC) Construction Safety Excellence Award, standing out from other companies in the nation for their outstanding safety metrics and practices. 

FTI’s best-in-class implementation involved key stakeholders from the beginning

Josh understood the importance of involving key stakeholders from the beginning of the search for a solution. “Everyone, including upper management and leadership, was willing to change. Having buy-in from all the key stakeholders made it easy for us to roll out the SafetyCulture platform quickly once the decision was made.”

FTI began implementing SafetyCulture with a phased rollout, hundreds of licenses at a time, starting with field safety audits. Starting small allowed FTI to not only quickly identify hazards, but also to provide focused training and collect data from each phase on the rollout to make each smoother than the last. 

Before launching the SafetyCulture platform across their entire national organization, FTI ensured the necessary technology was in place – users had the SafetyCulture mobile app downloaded on their devices and Single Sign On was enabled. Josh brought in the communications, IT, business technology, and safety teams, determining the key stakeholders from each team that would benefit from SafetyCulture’s data. Because of this, FTI was set up to drive consistent communication about SafetyCulture from the start, which boosted buy-in from employees. They had training resources and answers to FAQs ready to go as usage grew.

Maintaining engagement for 850 users nationwide is no easy task, but FTI ties SafetyCulture performance to incentive programs to keep everyone using it consistently. “To drive safety and keep everyone accountable, we have a gainshare incentive for a quarterly bonus. We require two audits per week from each team member, which gives us a regular stream of information coming in that we can use to further improve,” said Josh.

Josh has also partnered with SafetyCulture’s Customer Success Team to regularly identify new ways to use the SafetyCulture platform and optimize existing processes. “The entire team has been outstanding about communicating and addressing any issues or questions that have come up.”

Diving deeper into the data to make proactive decisions

Many organizations look to compliance as a baseline metric. Thanks to FTI’s digital processes, they receive actionable data that makes it possible to drive strategic decision making beyond compliance. 

Tracking the top frequently failed items across inspections is uncovering areas of improvement. Using the Frequently Failed Items report in Analytics, Josh tweaks his inspection templates regularly to ask for evidence in the form of pictures and notes when inspectors mark these responses as “failed.” This is allowing him to drill down deeper into the data, find leading indicators, identify key areas of improvement, and create a targeted approach to safety communications that ensures the same incidents don’t occur again.

“We are taking feedback from our teams along with the data we are seeing to make our audits more effective,” said Josh. 

Data has allowed frontline employees to be more aware of the hazards they’re exposed to, and the safety team to adopt proactive safety mindsets and remain agile to changes in risk such as poor weather conditions. 

Even in an extremely hazardous industry, FTI saw a 68% reduction in the frequency of reportable incidents since implementing SafetyCulture. Compared to the previous year’s commendable Total Recordable Injury Rate (TRIR) of 0.44, they saw a drop to an even lower rate of 0.18. Constant vigilance and improvement of safety processes is a priority for FTI and the numbers show it. In 2021, 5 million man-hours were worked across its organization and only 5 recordable safety incidents occurred. An extraordinary 64,000 inspections have been conducted in the SafetyCulture platform and that amount only continues to grow.

FTI isn’t just measuring their success by the improvement it can quantify. It considers employee safety the greatest success of all. “SafetyCulture is an integral part of our processes. The data we are collecting is allowing our teams to become more aware of hazards they’re exposed to and preventing incidents. More than anything, we care about our people and want them to get home safely at the end of the day. When it comes to ROI, there is no dollar value to coming home to a hug from my son.” 

Watch Josh share his story, best practices, and tips and tricks for SafetyCulture success at the 2021 Made Extraordinary Summit. Check out his session, How to Use Your Data for Impactful Results. 

SafetyCulture meets the needs of multiple divisions 

After seeing the impact of Safety Culture platform within the Faith Technologies division of the organization, FTI’s Excellerate manufacturing division has also adopted the tool to maintain manufacturing best practices. Senior Safety Manager, Joseph Bolle, manages the safety programs for five separate manufacturing facilities where they produce electrical components and assemblies. One of his key responsibilities is identifying areas for safety improvement.

Every value stream leader completes at least one inspection in SafetyCulture per week, including 5S and Lean Manufacturing audits to create and improve efficiency, as well as facility audits to make sure the spaces themselves are in compliance. 

Before SafetyCulture, these inspections were completed mostly on paper. “Pulling data from inspections used to be time consuming and cumbersome. We had to do a lot of guessing around the completion of corrective actions. Now, we can get really specific with information and see exactly where issues lay,” said Bolle. 

One of the biggest impacts SafetyCulture has made to how this group operates is the ability to assign corrective actions within it to the right person to get the job done. Every action taken is recorded within SafetyCulture, and there is accountability to get issues resolved quickly, and Joseph gets notified when corrective actions have been completed. 

Using SafetyCulture Analytics, Joseph pulls data bi-weekly and uses the top 10 frequently failed items as focus points for continuous improvement and to identify trends.