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Hard hats and lipstick help build new civil construction app.
30 October 2023
Screenshot from the ToolBox App
“I know it’s going to make people’s lives easier,” changemaker Hollie Atarau says of Toolbox, the app she’s developed for her civil construction sector employers and is now trialling with a range of other East Coast companies
Her optimism is echoed by Kat Kaiwai, who with Hollie’s help has customised Toolbox for her business Tairawhiti Contractors, a traffic management company she runs from remote Ruatoria. They’re testing it now and hope to roll it out for their thirty-two staff next week.
“I think this is such a good news story – not only on the East Coast but in other rural areas,” Kat says.
Screenshot from the ToolBox App
The app began life when Hollie, Quality and Environmental Advisor for Waiotahi Contractors Ltd, started looking for a new health and safety system. Waiotahi has two hundred-odd employees working in a civil construction, quarrying, sheetpiling and trucking across several sites including four quarries.
The search set her thinking about affordability, especially for smaller businesses, as she assessed products costing from $7000 - $30,000, and consultants charging high hourly rates.
She also wondered how small traders could find the time for compliance alongside managing staff, chasing and pricing jobs, securing supplies and so on. She knows this issue first hand - Hollie’s husband is a self-employed builder.
The standard approach to Health and Safety, Environmental and Quality requirements has been paper-based, with site supervisors collecting and collating information and someone in Head Office entering it into a spreadsheet for submission. It can be especially onerous in multi-site businesses, with workers often some distance away from either headquarters or one another.
Some smaller operators just don’t get on top of it. At worst lack of evidence of compliance can see them locked out of tendering opportunities with commissioning agencies like councils and Waka Kotahi.
Hollie’s thinking jelled when organising an induction video and the logistics required for staff to see it. That meant bringing them to a central site, ensuring enough cover on the job, enough screens for them to view and so on. So why not take it to them?
Building on an existing app, Jotform, and with help from a broader civil construction working group Hollie came up with Toolbox. Access is via a QR code, and subscriptions start at an affordable $US34 a month. As well as links for training resources and compliance forms it has a newspage, quality management and industry links.
Screenshot from the ToolBox App
Health and safety isn’t part of Hollie’s day job. That part of the content came from Waipukurau-based specialist Rachael McNaught. Now running her own support and advisory service, Crewsafe, Rachael brought similar pragmatism to the task.
“It needed to work offline, and essentially offer purposeful collection and easy reporting,” she says.
“We all want to get things done. I just want to help.”
The two came together through Thriving Infrastructure, an initiative led by Worksafe’s Innovation team with MBIE funding and co-governance, along with colleagues from other parts of the sector.
Rachael was already known to project lead Charlene Donald, who introduced her to Hollie. Charlene had also once worked with Kat at Fulton Hogan – and now knew her as an innovator running her own business up the coast. An invitation to a Thriving Infrastructure workshop put Hollie and Kat together “and my brain started flying,” Kat says.
“There are so many benefits for me and for other rural businesses. I’ve got our guys testing it – can it do this? Can it do that? I know the feedback will be good,” Kat says.
“And I know it will save us money. The efficiency gains are harder to measure but ‘til now I’ve had two people in the office nearly fulltime handling the paperwork. They’re probably bored with punching daily jobs into the computer. That will probably be over by the end of the year.”
The app’s value goes beyond compliance. Small and medium sized businesses – a large component of New Zealand’s business sector – get valuable information. They can use the data they collect to capture evidence of qualifications and training, time sheet information, analytics for safety incidents and inform schedules for mobile plant maintenance.
This project exemplifies the ‘connect, share and learn’ mantra that underpins the Thriving Infrastructure approach.
Around the country different groups with diverse memberships are each tackling particular issues in infrastructure repair, replacement or rebuilds and formulating innovative approaches.
While there’s joy in working up a solution as women in construction – “hard hats and lipstick,” they summarise - Hollie and Rachael are quick to credit the input from others in their working group. Watercare Auckland’s Johan Gerritsen and Isaacs’ Construction representative Andy Dyson were in from the start.
And Hollie namechecks Richard Apthorp from Byfords Construction and Worksafe’s James Higgins who shared valuable insights and enhanced the original content.
Photo taken during WorkShop 3 - September
“It was very much a collaborative effort,” she says.
Johan endorses that. “Everyone on the team worked very hard and we made it our own. The team needs the credit.”
Hollie says setting Toolbox up for Kat took about an hour and a half. Waiotahi and other companies trialling it will do so for about a month “and I know the feedback will be good. “
She’s really happy to facilitate improvements in her part of the country, where Cyclone Gabriel has hit already compromised infrastructure hard.
And along with the rest of the team she’s looking forward to seeing Toolbox roll out across the sector. “I’m really excited for what comes next.”