I'm Simon Olliff, Managing Director of Banyard Solutions the company that’s created and developed ePermits.
ePermits is a work authorisation and permit to work system. Typically our clients have devised an excellent regime that they've tried to operate through paper but, having got that as far as they can and recognising that there's a disconnect between the policies that they've set and what's actually happening in the field, they've looked to us to try and rebuild that disconnection.
Implementing ePermits, it automates the diligence that they're looking to have in their process and it breathes life into the paper-based process that they’d originally designed.
The primary benefit of implementing ePermits is that it reduces risks and over the years we found that our clients have four types of risk that they need have reduced and that ePermits can help them with.
The first is the risk of injury to people, that’s the people doing the work, their colleagues around them and, of course, the general public. Then there's a risk of damage to their infrastructure, the valuable buildings that they’re operating from, and there's the risk of disruption to their business or their operation which can be very costly, and then there's security of the estate.
Now those four risks are present with all of our clients but generally in a different balance. Ultimately what we're trying to achieve are fewer incidents. The cost of failure of those incidents can be quite colossal. Nationally, or for an individual building, they're huge and we're trying to eliminate those. That also transpires into their their insurance premiums which they can get down considerably once they've been implementing ePermits for some time.
Then, of course, are the productivity gains. All of this extra control is not at the expense of time, it's actually cheaper to use the system than to do it by hand, manually.
Most of our end user clients these days come through the facilities management companies that we forged deep relationships with. They brought us clients from the banking sector, from data centres, airports and airlines, central government departments, broadcasting, the nuclear industry, leisure, prisons, hospitals, and more. They face different hazards, they're operating different tasks and they're operating in different environments, so we have to have flexibility within our system to emulate their processes, to account for their different policies, to handle the different scenario management that they need and produce different documents and, indeed, in the different languages that they now demand of us.
A key thing that distinguishes ePermits from other systems is that we took the decision right at the outset to operate at a very granular level, and by that I mean that we started to collect data around people not just companies. So we'd collect the data around their their competencies which we can then compare with the policies and the rules and the standards that are set by our end user clients and decide right before the the work starts whether that team is competent and safe to undertake that work.
Over the years we've collected a national database with hundreds of thousands of operatives, training and competence details which we keep on file and the beauty is it's all kept up to a date by the supply chain companies themselves that want to work through the FM companies for our large end-user clients.
Before every major release that we do, we go out to one of the top five penetration testing companies and have our software and our hardware penetration tested for a period of two weeks and that is a very intense period of human and machine hacking to see whether they can get into our system, or to do things once they're in there that they shouldn't be allowed to do given their permissions.
After 12 years of developing ePermits we've taken the opportunity to set up a user forum which is drawn from our super-users across our major clients. The user forum continues to share with us what they're looking for from our system and it’s not just about the flow of the system, the look and feel, it's also about the range of functionality. There are subtleties and extensions to the functionality that people are looking for which we've committed to them to develop so that it remains a system that they want to use and enjoy using.
