Woods Glass (Thermosash Group)

You’ve probably walked through your fair share of big, beautiful glass buildings and thought, “Wow.” But have you ever really stopped to think about what goes into producing such magnificent structures? That’s what Woods Glass specializes in. A company within the Thermosash Group, it provides world-class solutions in the design manufacture, and installation of bespoke engineered building envelopes throughout New Zealand and abroad. 

A lot goes into creating building envelopes – from designing, engineering, manufacturing, transportation, and installation. Graham Berry, Group General Manager HSEQ Assurance at Thermosash Group, played a pivotal part in rolling out SafetyCulture exclusively at Woods Glass to improve its operations.

What’s a building envelope?

Think of it like a protective shell around a building, which physically separates the outdoor environment from the inside. These include walls, roofs, windows, and doors. It keeps the indoor climate comfortable and protects against the weather and other outside elements.

Becoming SafetyCulture Certified to fix cracks in operations

When Graham first came on board at Woods Glass, after a career in the highly process-driven aviation industry, he described his first impression of the organization as “world-class scramblers and firefighters”.

“Because we didn’t have a robust system to manage the complex nature of our operation, we’d have a problem over here and we’d throw resources at it and fix it,” he explains. “Then there’d be another problem over there and we’d dash over to fix that.” Despite the scramble to issue quick fixes, the same problems reoccurred. Although the end results were impressive Graham knew Woods Glass needed to build a better framework, and he wanted to do it with the SafetyCulture platform. 

To kick things off, he assembled a team to focus on improving the business and maintaining its systems. Initially, everyone wore several hats covering audit and compliance, coordination and documentation, platform management, and learning and development. 

Graham felt confident in his abilities, having recently become SafetyCulture Certified. So he made it a requirement for the rest of his team to complete the same certification to become improvement specialists. Once other employees started working with SafetyCulture, they saw how intuitive and easy it was to use — even if they didn’t consider themselves tech-savvy.

SafetyCulture Certified

This is a product certification course that turns people into improvement specialists by taking them through each element of the SafetyCulture platform. Completing the course will give you a greater understanding of how to transform your business, gain recognition and status for doing so, and elevate your career. To learn more, head to safetyculture.com/certifications.

Shattering expectations in the glass business

Ensuring inspections are up to scratch

You wouldn’t believe how many QA checks actually go into creating a single window assembly. From technical inspections of each individual component to quality checks of the finished product. 

Graham says Woods Glass has always delivered high-quality work, “but there was a significant cost with jobs that left the factory, only to return with a flagged quality issue,” he explains. “It’s about three times the cost to bring something back into the factory to fix.”

Graham knew that to save on cost, they needed to systemize and streamline their quality checks and inspections. “Some of these are really critical,” Graham says.

Before SafetyCulture, it was not uncommon for Woods Glass to receive reports of damage in their window assemblies. Because QA checklists weren’t accompanied by images, Woods Glass didn’t have reliable evidence of whether or not the product was damaged with them or after installation. 

Now, thanks to SafetyCulture’s Inspections feature, “when items come into our logistics team, they’ll thoroughly go through the checklists. They’ll check it’s the right item and there are no dents, knicks, or scratches,” Graham says. Critical steps in the assembly process require photos which are now uploaded directly within the platform. 

Also, the contractors are asked to cite the quality checklists and photos, and confirm that they’re happy with it. Once all the QA checks are completed the job is certified by our Quality Assurance Inspectors (QAI), the information is time-stamped, which means fewer disputes and better accountability.

No more lost or misplaced assets

Much like any other construction business, Woods Glass has a huge amount of tools and equipment. So huge, in fact, that they didn’t have a centralized list or record of what they had, where things were, who had it, and the last time it had been serviced. Basically, asset management was a nightmare to deal with. 

For example, to transport big window frames and glass, they need to be secured onto large A-frames that are delivered to job sites. “We’ve got heaps of these, but we didn’t know exactly how many or where they were,” Graham says. He joked that “the day we saw a competitor driving past with what looked like one of our coveted A-frames on the bed of their truck, we knew we had a problem.”

Now Woods Glass has complete visibility over all of its equipment. How? It’s all thanks to QR codes, which are linked to SafetyCulture’s Assets feature. 

At the factory, every single item, equipment, and tool is fitted with QR codes. When a team member grabs a tool, they scan the QR code to let others know that they’re in possession of that tool. They’ll do a pre-start check on the item, which tells the rest of the team where it’s located, as well as whether or not it’s due for maintenance. 

‘What is this sorcery?’ you might wonder. It’s not magic – it’s actually thanks to SafetyCulture’s Integration, which allows our platform to communicate with an external system, where serial and batch numbers for inventory are loaded. They then use an API to link SafetyCulture Assets to this information. From there, they can produce unique QR codes that house all crucial information for each asset. 

As for those wandering A-frames? They’re taken into account too. The driver can now scan its unique QR code to record when the A-frame is picked up and taken to a site. They then scan the code again to verify it’s been delivered and returned. 

Now you’re speaking my language – training the masses

With a diverse staff of about 17 nationalities, the company found it challenging to deliver training and SOPs in a way that addressed language barriers. “It wasn’t fair [to them] because they weren’t presented with the information in a way they could easily understand,” Graham says. “They might sort of shuffle through documents occasionally and sign it to say they’d read through them and understood them,” Graham shares. But it was hard to keep team members accountable. 

They started using SafetyCulture Training to navigate through these hurdles. First, they experimented with the AI translation feature to overcome language barriers and deliver training to team members in their native languages, leading to increased understanding and knowledge retention among those employees. They also used SafetyCulture’s existing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training course and customized it to align with their company requirements. 

Woods Glass no longer relies on the ‘maybe they did, maybe they didn’t’ approach to keep track of trained employees. Through SafetyCulture’s Analytics, they can officially verify confirmation that employees have completed the necessary training required by different regulatory agencies. “We can now assign these courses to different work groups, provide evidence they completed the course, and see that they completed the competency assessment,” Graham adds. 

They also used Training to onboard all new employees and even created an ‘Introduction to HSEQ Management’ course from scratch to get the whole team onboarded with the new processes and systems. 

Giving workers a voice to flag crucial issues

The QR code magic doesn’t just stop at asset management. 

Graham notes that every single Woods Glass employee he spoke with – whether it was a manager or frontline worker – knew the business could be better. They’d witness issues with quality, safety, or a variety of other areas, but didn’t have a reliable way to communicate that information upwards.

That meant the business was missing out on valuable opportunities to improve while workers felt their ideas and experiences were left unheard and overlooked. 

Graham notes that SafetyCulture’s Issues feature has now given every employee the opportunity to voice their opinion and feel confident that the information is going somewhere.

If and when team members see an issue, they scan a specific QR code dotted around the workplace, select the correct category of the issue from a dropdown menu, and enter their information. SafetyCulture will “drop it into the inbox of the appropriate manager to deal with that,” Graham notes. 

Graham and his team can also use Analytics to review occurrence reports and identify trends. In short, Graham says that SafetyCulture has helped the company – not just take corrective action when an issue is uncovered – but also preventative action to ensure the same problem doesn’t crop up again. He gives this real-life example of how that happens at Woods Glass: 

1. Identification: Received multiple quality occurrence reports about poor-quality silicone weather seals at the QA stage.
   
2. Investigation: Identified the root cause was a lack of training and certification.
   
3. Corrective action: Sent team members to the site to fix the job.
   
4. Preventative action: Created a training course within SafetyCulture with an assessment and formal certification that’s issued upon completion.
5. Monitoring: Notified appropriate staff members about the change and asked them to monitor the issue to confirm it was resolved

As a result, Woods Glass now gets out ahead of problems — rather than continuing the cycle of scrambling to put out fires.

Through the looking glass and into the future

Graham says he and the team have already seen firsthand the impact SafetyCulture has made at Woods Glass. “This is early days for us,” he says. “But we can already see the transformation happening.”

In fact, the implementation of SafetyCulture at Woods Glass has been so successful that the Board of Directors of Thermosash Group has now strengthened Graham’s team with dedicated improvement specialists and is prioritizing the rollout of SafetyCulture across the entire group of companies — a goal Graham is intensely focused on this year.

“The SafetyCulture platform is capable of replacing three other software systems we use for managing HSEQ requirements,” he concludes. “It will be embedded across all operations in 2024.”