Safety Plus Inc was founded in 1991, with the concept of providing high quality loss control that concentrates on reducing a company’s risk. Safety Plus efficiently solves safety, compliance and loss control issues for companies regardless of their tolerances for risk. Founded and based in Mobile, Alabama, Safety Plus currently manages all aspects of safety, health, and environmental issues for over 150 client firms from three offices across the U.S. Clients served are a variety of government and commercial contractors in the industrial and manufacturing sectors.

By focusing on all aspects of loss control for a large number of clients, Safety Plus is able to generate efficiencies not possible with employee driven programs. Safety Plus’s solutions excel in creating effective loss control programs that are financially feasible for small and large enterprises alike. Safety Plus recovers lost money by assisting with OSHA, USDOT, MSHA, and EPA compliance, as well as insurance management and employee training. As third party administrators, Safety Plus delivers an aggressive brand of risk management that generates good returns on investments and reduces employee related risks.

Business Need:

Safety Plus averaged double digit revenue growth rates across the last 3 years. That growth led to strains on labor capacity and highlighted the need for process controls. The first issue is one of scale; a healthy growth in the overall number of customers increased the volume of customer deliverables.  This created a pressure to expand labor capacity in order to maintain timely and accurate customer service. Maximizing labor efficiencies, both to optimize the output of their existing highly skilled resources and to free up time for them to properly train new resources, became an obvious strategic target for Safety Plus. The second issue was the concurrent rapid evolution of regulations faced by Safety Plus’ customers. Those Government regulations increased in both volume and complexity each year. Most of these regulations are deadline driven and require consistently accurate and timely delivery of information to various government agencies and regulatory bodies in order to avoid costly penalties.

Recognizing the need and opportunity set before them, Safety Plus set out to find a web based task management solution to enable them to manage consistent task delivery for customers as they scaled up, minimize labor costs as work volumes increased, support continued sustainable growth, and enhance profitability.

The Solution:

Safety Plus completed the entire software selection process and a successful implementation effort in two months.  The JobTraQ task management and workflow system was quickly placed into production and rapidly adopted by all employees. Subsequently, Safety Plus also made their JobTraQ installation accessible to their clients to allow those clients to see and track the progress of their deliverables in real time. The JobTraQ solution now manages 100% of customer requests and tasks.  Two thirds of those tasks are recurring activities which have been pre-defined in JobTraQ to enable better planning and simpler administration. A significant portion of the remaining tasks managed in JobTraQ are related to case management, conducting accident investigations involving employee injuries or equipment damage for Safety Plus customers. Data collected during the investigation is utilized for legal and insurance reporting.

During the implementation phase, Safety Plus completed an analysis of their existing businesses processes and evaluated how to use JobTraQ to optimize a variety of tasks and workflow processes.  Many of the existing processes were being managed through paper-based forms which were labor intensive and difficult to manage or track.  These forms were converted into electronic forms in JobTraQ to create a fully automated digital process with increased visibility and metrics.  Processes deemed to be recurring were pre-defined for auto-generation and flow to ensure compliance and timely delivery.

Safety Plus has been able to exercise a high degree of control over how the artifacts, ownership and assignment of the tasks within a business process flow through the organization by leveraging JobTraQ’s deeply customizable forms, fields, statuses, and workflow rules. This dynamic agility was critical to Safety Plus because of the wide and changing scope of activities they must complete in order to support their clients. Many of their processes change frequently as government regulations change, and different clients may be impacted in different ways thereby becoming liable for varying deliverables within otherwise similar guidelines.  The agility provided by JobTraQ has allowed Safety Plus to deliver highly tailored and highly automated solutions to their clients in keeping with, and even ahead of, the mandated pace of change – all within cohesive and standardized methodology.

The Results:

Since the deployment of JobTraQ for the Safety Plus operations department, all of the expected and many ancillary benefits have been realized. By converting paper based processes into an automated solution, the employee resource pool was optimized and allowed Safety Plus to take on more work without the need to increase staffing levels as previously expected. Additionally, employees who were now operating more efficiently were able to take on responsibilities previously performed only by senior management. This allowed senior management to spend more time developing new products and services designed to further expand the business and increase profitability.

As a service company, Safety Plus performs numerous periodic recurring tasks for each customer throughout the year, with a total of more than 5,000 recurring projects per year. Their previous paper and email based system of assignment only captured 25% of the performance data needed to demonstrate successful performance to the customer. With JobTraQ’s dynamic web based forms and strong internal auditing, 100% of all activities are now recorded as they occur. JobTraQ stores all of the details of these records, and their artifacts (documents, pictures, scans, etc.), to be permanently memorialized in a centralized database. Performance review meetings with clients now include empirical metrics and detailed information about service activities that validate and differentiate the value that Safety Plus provides to their clients. Without this data, clients historically sought to reduce their spending or competitively seek out alternate vendors. JobTraQ has provided a competitive advantage to Safety Plus through this visible performance data and delivered additional benefit to their clients who can now rest assured that their regulatory compliance is in good hands.

JobTraQ’s task management system has provided Safety Plus employees and managers with real-time access to the status and details of client related tasks, from anywhere, using a web browser or mobile device. This ensures that critical items do not slip through the cracks and that all deliverables are completed on time. Furthermore, Safety Plus’ decision to configure JobTraQ so that their customers can log into the system and see the status of their projects and tasks from start to finish has been well received by clients, which gives Safety Plus yet another competitive advantage.

After resolving many of the initially identified business needs, Safety Plus expanded their JobTraQ deployment, tapping JobTraQ to also manage sales lead tracking and billing functions. Those departments are now enjoying productivity boosts similar to those experienced by the operations team.

Amy Stephenson, Operations Manager at Safety Plus said, reflecting on their JobTraQ choice and implementation, “Utilizing JobTraQ was the only way we were able to continue to meet our business challenges and continue to grow the company”.

About Swift Software:

Swift Software Inc is an innovative developer of Task Management and Workflow Software for the Enterprise.  JobTraQ, which is Swift Software’s flagship product, provides organizations of all kinds with the ability to quickly design, configure, and deploy effective, scalable, and extensible Task-Centric Business Process, Project, Program and Workflow Management Solutions.
For more information, please contact sales@JobTraQ.com

CUnet delivers industry-leading technology, media, and marketing services to more than 1,000 colleges and higher education institutions across the US and Canada to help reach, recruit and enroll the right students.  Driven by a commitment to technology leadership, regulatory compliance, and exceptional customer service, CUnet’s higher education experts partner with schools to improve marketing performance and deliver qualified inquiries that meet enrollment and retention goals.  With over 8 years’ experience in overseeing online marketing initiatives, CUnet offers one of the most experienced teams of interactive marketers in the higher education space.

CUnet is a subsidiary of Nelnet which is one of the leading education and finance companies in the US.  Nelnet provides quality student loan products and services to students, as well as a full range of student-lending services and technology-based products to schools nationwide. This includes student loan origination and lending, holding, student loan and guarantee servicing, and software solutions.

Nelnet (NYSE: NNI), based in Lincoln, Nebraska, ranks among the nation’s leaders in terms of total student loan assets under management with $26.3 billion in net student loan assets as of March 31, 2008.

Nelnet is well positioned to capitalize on industry growth. Its sophisticated technology and software products allow the company to service loans both internally and for third parties, which facilitates the company’s position as a preferred originator and holder of loans for schools and borrowers.

Business Need:

With CUnet managing campaigns for so many different colleges and institutions, processing and handling requests and changes to their information and requirements created an ongoing challenge.  In an average week, CUnet receives more than 1,100 requests from 65 different clients.  In addition, with numerous combinations of secondary vendors being engaged for fulfillment of campaigns for each client, the number of modifications to track grew exponentially.  As this continued to scale, it was often difficult for the office managers to determine whether each vendor had made all of the required changes for every client request timely, or at all.  CUnet utilized numerous copies of local spreadsheets to manage this process, which led to confusion about which was the most recent version and who was working on or managing which request.  In addition, this process provided almost no visibility for management and no metrics by which to measure success or failure.

CUnet needed a solution that was easy to use, centralized, and would provide both a comprehensive view for the customer management and vendor management teams so they could both quickly see what tasks were requested and completed by the clients/vendors.

The Solution:

CUnet engaged JobTraQ’s Professional Services team to design a solution based on the JobTraQ Task Management System.  The goals were an easy to use, consistent, and automated solution providing a unified account management system for two related organizations with distinct tracking needs.  JobTraQ now manages the assignment of the appropriate internal and external resources automatically and simultaneously, and immediately notifies them of the steps required to complete customer requests when those requests are received.  The JobTraQ system now makes these open requests highly visible, manageable and accountable.  Utilizing this centralized solution, CUnet has subsequently been able to implement and tightly integrate a relational matrix which allows JobTraQ to assign internal resources to manage specific Schools or clients as well as specific Vendors.  The total solution now dynamically recognizes which Schools and Vendors are associated to a request and assigns the necessary tasks to the appropriate internal resources to ensure that the Customer or Vendor is interacting with the right people for all requests and increasing the strength of the relationship.  JobTraQ core functionality is leveraged to manage each request from beginning to completion, and the solution dynamically creates follow up audit requests to ensure the Vendors are in compliance to the School’s requests.

Overall, user training and adoption has been successful, with existing associates taking 2 to 3 months to fully adopt the system and begin to realize the true value of JobTraQ.  On average, new associates are able to acclimate and adapt within a week, as they have no previous experience to adjust from.

Results:

CUnet has been utilizing their JobTraQ solution for approximately one year, and today they have brought their vendor completion rate from under 70% to over 96% and are now completing more than 75% of their tasks in less than two days.  JobTraQ has enabled CUnet to record metrics such as the number of tasks (both open and completed) per client or vendor, the time spent to complete tasks by different vendors and internal resources, and other measures of business value.  The most valuable reports provided by this solution are those that display the overall throughput of the organization.  By analyzing all of the data at once, CUnet is able to identify trends by team members, clients, and vendors that would have been impossible to understand prior to having the data aggregated into one system and each task systematically tracked through the entire workflow.  In addition, utilizing JobTraQ and having a well-defined task management structure in place has allowed for the rapid addition of a new team into the business process which ensures that each vendor is compliant with and remains in compliance with the School’s requests and performance expectations.  This in turn has created the opportunity for CUnet to expand the list of services provided to their customers.  Jeff Herz, Director, Internal Operations, said “We are much more adaptable now, able to identify business problems and then build a process around that problem and automate it very quickly.  Thanks to JobTraQ, the automation is probably now the fastest piece of that puzzle.”

About Swift Software:

Swift Software Inc is an innovative developer of Task Management Software for the Enterprise.  JobTraQ, which is Swift Software’s flagship product, provides organizations of all kinds with the ability to quickly design, configure, and deploy effective, scalable, and extensible Task-Centric Business Process, Project, Program and Workflow Management Solutions.

For more information, please contact sales@JobTraQ.com