CMS Overview
The benefits of outsourcing facility management and engineering services are well established and documented. However, the management of third party contractors on customer sites presents many challenges to Health & Safety / Facility Managers.
There are several characteristics about contractors working on site that put contractors into a high risk category.
- Contractors frequently undertake non standard and hazardous tasks
- Many contractors are likely to be unfamiliar with the site
- Customers are often unfamiliar with the contractors and their competencies
- Contractors probably work outside internal safety and quality procedures
These characteristics elevate health and safety risk but also pose risks to the integrity of the core operation and infrastructure.
The number of contractors on site varies, depending on the degree of outsourcing and the nature of the facility but a typical facility would have 100+ service provider contracts active during any given year. (This does not take account of contractors associated with project works).
Every time a contractor arrives on site to perform a service, there is a raft of paperwork to be completed before work can commence. For example:
- Is the supplier approved?
- Does the supplier hold valid insurance?
- Is the contractor inducted for the site? Is the induction valid?
- Does the contractor have proof of competence / training records?
- Is the contractor scheduled for today?
- Is the contractor bringing chemicals onto site?
- Is the contactors bringing tools on site? Are the tools certified?
- Does the job have a method statement / risk assessment?
- Does the job have a permit? Was the permit signed off?
- Was the service report completed?
This is a non-exhaustive list, but it is obvious that keeping track of 100+ Contractors is a major administrative task. A further complication is that normally several different organisational departments are assigned to manage specific aspects of contractor management. For example, purchasing usually manage supplier qualification, health and safety usually manage site inductions, whilst facilities / engineering often manage permits, and so on. The result is that contractor management information is fragmented throughout the customer organisation and nobody has a complete view of the contractors and what they are doing on site. This information gap creates potentially dangerous situations, e.g. untrained contractors, non-inducted contractors, unknown contractors on site, etc.
In addition to the health and safety issues, inefficient administration leads to gaps in compliance, poor audit trails, failed audits, duplication, information silos and wasted time. The bottom line is that poor control of Contractor Management leads to higher risk operating conditions and wasted resources (time and money).
CMS Description
The Contractor Management System (CMS) is a web enabled database tool that comprehensively manages all aspects of third party contractors with intuitive drill-down tools to rapidly access all relevant information and provide an integrated view of contractors working on site, see Fig. 1.
Figure 1 - Integrated Contractor Management System