“Like a Breath of Fresh Air”

To learn about Galliford Try's success at Guyhirn, we spoke with Neil Scullion, the regional health and safety manager for the regional development partnership at Galliford Try. He oversees six projects split into two regions: one on the A303 and the other five on the A47, including Guyhirn junction.

We spoke with Neil to learn about his experience using and implementing Passport.

How are you using Passport on the A47 project at Gurhirn?

Well, first off, everyone working on the site has a Passport checked when they turn up, whether office-bound or on-site.

We also have some simple mandatory requirements; the first is the HCI and the second is that everyone is to have a valid competency card. This means that it’s easy for us to do all our due diligence checks when people turn up.

From a principal contractor’s perspective, using Passport takes away all the hassle of maintaining spreadsheet databases and frees
up a lot of time for the site team. Not just that, but spreadsheets don’t alert you when cards are expired.

Passport makes it so simple, workers turn up on-site and an access controller scans their card. We can immediately see all the data we
need, then swipe them in, or if the system rejects them, we know why it was. You get none of that with a spreadsheet.

You were in charge of implementing Passport at Guyhirn. How did you find the
implementation?

It’s been a doddle, if I’m honest with you. It has gone really well; it’s so much better than the other systems on the market. It’s much
easier, but it also has more features. I’m personally self-taught. The system is entirely self-explanatory.

All I had to do was get the site team up to standard, which only took two or three calls. One of our access controllers missed the first
meeting, so he could only make one; he still found the system easy to use.

How was the support?

Reference Point have been fantastic - like a breath of fresh air! I’ve used other systems in the past, and whilst the systems weren’t great, the support was even worse. It was all done via email with no hands-on help.

Whereas with Passport, if we’ve had any problems, we’ve had rapid support from the team, helping us get across any hurdles.

How are you using Passport on the A47 project at Gurhirn? 

The team have been using it to swipe-in and swipe-out, to award competencies and to spot check. They’re even capturing travel
time to manage fatigue. The two guys driving the system - Matthew Aldridge and Nemo Choudhury - have done a great job. They’re
both site engineers and are in charge of the works that are happening at the moment. They’ve been swiping people in and out each
day with no problems.

In the first twenty days, we’ve had hundreds and hundreds of swipes, which shows how quickly the team got used to it.

What was your reaction when you first learnt about Passport and were asked to implement it?

It’s been a long time coming.

I’ve been excited about Passport ever since I first learnt about it. That one platform where everybody is all in the same place, with all of
our sub-contractors already using it.

I’ve admired Sentinel in the past purely because it shares information across the industry. I put Passport in the same sort of boat as the Sentinel card. It means that for anyone working in the highways industry, we can see where they’ve worked, what training they have, how much experience they have, how many competencies they hold - and this is vital information. But, beforehand, we didn’t have it.

Do you have any plans to start using more areas of the system?

Oh definitely.

I want to use more of the fatigue management functionality. We’re already tracking journey times so that we can know if someone is
safe to work, but we’d like to set it up so that there is an automatic flag to alert the access controller if someone has worked too many
hours.

We’re also starting to use it for alerts sent out by National Highways or internally from Galliford Try. These alerts usually come on the back of an incident, and we then carry out some related training on-site to make sure everyone is aware. With Passport, we can then award that as a zone-based competence to everyone that attended the briefing. This then means we can efficiently run reports on and check compliance.

In the past, we had to do all this with paper and spreadsheets, which makes for a tiresome task if you have to ensure you’ve captured
everything you need to.

This sort of thing makes a massive difference to the site team. Before Passport, their lives were filled with things like spreadsheets,
photocopying and scanners. Now all they have to do is swipe a workers card!

Finally, would you encourage other organisations and projects to use the system?

Yes. Absolutely.

Guyhirn was the tester for us, but we’ll definitely be using Passport for all our future projects and I would one hundred percent encourage everyone else too as well.

It’s better than the other access control systems anyway, but when you add in the value that comes from sharing data across the industry, it’s a no-brainer.