
Company
Committed to helping churches and charities achieve their goals through building maintenance, caretaking and support.
Industry
Facilities management
Covenant offer a range of services aimed at churches, charities and more recently, primary and secondary schools, to help them become more efficient and enable them to concentrate on their mission. Knowing that charities and churches are often bogged down with building issues, unused space and other difficulties which stop them achieving their goals, Covenant provides a combined approach to church and charity building maintenance, caretaking and support.
Challenges
A paper-based system
Covenant already recognized their duty to make sure all their documentation was correct and up to the standards set by the HSE before work could take place. However, they had previously been using a traditional paper-based system which Office Manager, Katie, describes as being difficult to manage given the amount of contractors and employees they have working at different sites.
Managing different sites
It would be difficult to make sure everything was signed and in place before a job started. They would often have to get contractors and employees to come into the office to sign paper versions of documents which was time consuming and could risk unnecessary delays to projects.
Keeping all staff engaged and up-to-date
With new recruits and contractors joining the team all the time, ensuring that everyone had what they needed to do the job safely and competently was hugely time consuming.
It would be difficult to make sure everything was signed and in place before a job started, mainly because we had our contractors and employees working at different sites and people were unable to come into the office to complete the paperwork beforehand.
Katie Poursain
Office Manager
How CRAMS has helped
From the initial set-up of their new CRAMS site to times when Covenant have required additional support and training, they have found that the team at CRAMS have been fast to respond and keen to help. They can get CRAMS on the phone or via their chat functionality on the website during office hours and the team can quickly guide them through the best and quickest ways to use the intuitive system.
It has been easy to use and really helpful to have such a quick response from the CRAMS team whenever we are unsure or need to have something re-explained to us.
Katie Poursain
Office Manager
Outcome
No more paper!
Now with CRAMS, staff can sign in from anywhere, read digital versions of all their risk assessments, method statements and policies and then acknowledge them within the system ready to get on with their tasks. The admins and competent person can check who is up to date with their compliance and training to ensure only qualified staff are assigned to a job.
Time savings
Katie states that managing Covenant’s health and safety obligations is now much quicker. With the CRAMS health and safety data management system, their administrators can create new CRAMS, get them signed off by the Competent person and then distributed to the relevant staff members at the click of a button. No more printing pages out and getting team members to come into the office to sign their documents off.
e-Learning for new recruits and contractors
Covenant utilise a mixture of employees and contractors when completing their projects so they have found the range of over 60 integrated e-learning modules very helpful in inducting new staff and also ensuring that all team members have the correct level of knowledge to fulfill their roles, no matter their previous level of experience. When a new member of staff joins the team, their profile can be set up ahead of time and all data is auto-populated to fit their job role. This means that as soon as they log in on day one they are presented with all of their e-learning alongside their CRAMS and company policies.
CRAMS is easy to use
Katie and the team at Covenant have found CRAMS easy to get set up with and are enjoying getting to use the all-inclusive features that help them to manage their health and safety obligations. They have found editing CRAMS to make them more relevant to their specific business is helping them to get more out of the system and acknowledgements helps them to stay on top of the ‘paper-work’ and keep track of the knowledge and competency of their staff members, chasing up those who have unactioned documents or overdue refreshers.
It also helps us keep up to date about what we need to have in place for certain jobs and helps us think of things we perhaps wouldn’t have thought about previously, especially when it comes to health and safety. We also like that we can keep the policies accessible and in one place for people to refer to at any time.
Katie Poursain
Office Manager