A shining star in Savills’ London portfolio, White City Place sits in the heart of London’s new business and innovation district. Home to industry leading brands like BBC and ITV, the team at White City Place leave no stone unturned in creating a world class campus for their tenants.
Managing a property with just under 1m sq ft of office space on a 17-acre estate with a multitude of maintenance, cleaning and security work kept the team very busy. Health and safety records were a concern, because manual processing at this scale was challenging with potential for human error and incomplete records. Both the check-in and induction processes were completed in-person.
These took up to 20 minutes to complete each time, along with further admin time storing and collating records. A change to site hazards or inductions created an extensive workload due to the wide number of contractors that needed to be manually contacted, re-inducted and recorded.
“We are always looking at ways to drive efficiency and productivity for our team and we had concerns about the accuracy and time taken to process H&S records and ensure compliance.” says White City Place Estate Director, Justin Waylen.
Safety is paramount for the team at White City, but like many sites of this scale, visibility of contractor whereabouts on the site was difficult. With several hazardous area’s, including a large plant room and contractors sometimes working in lone situations, the team wanted to enhance protection for contractors.
Regulatory bodies took health and safety just as seriously, with the UK’s HSE handing out £54.5 million in fines in 2019.
So, the White City Place Estate Management Team sought a smarter way to automate and collate compliance and asked Forsite how we could help.
“Safety is a high priority in everything we do at White City Place”
Tim Scourfield, White City Place
“With Forsite we leave no room for grey area in our compliance process”
Forsite provided automation and visibility to White City Place’s health and safety process. Our automated proof of presence system recognises and logs contractors presence, requiring them to check in on their mobile. A process that takes just seconds to complete and occurs in a completely contactless manor.
By automating required health and safety processes to contractor’s phones on arrival, the White City Place team has confidence that contractors are accounted for on site, fully inducted, and aware of any hazards. With Forsite, the team at White City have implemented multiple high-risk zones, providing comprehensive remote visibility of contractor location in hazardous areas.
As a cloud-based solution, the team can view site activity from anywhere in just seconds giving them 100% confidence of compliance around the clock. They also sleep easier knowing lone workers are protected through automated alerts if they exceed their declared time on site.
“Safety is key to our sites, Forsite enable’s total visbility of any work carried out in high risk areas. In the event where we need to locate someone, we can find this information out within seconds”
By eliminating nearly all admin time for health and safety processing, along with the stress of digging around manual paper trails for compliance records, the team at White City are now spending more time adding value. This efficiency gain isn’t going unnoticed by the wider property community, with the partnership being listed as a finalist for the PFM awards.
When COVID-19 struck, the team at White City were able to make an easy change to operating remotely thanks to Forsite. The visibility and automated process that Forsite enables gave the team confidence that any work completed was done so in a Covid secure and compliant manner. As the virus continues to create risk, the team plans to further take advantage of Forsite’s features to improve social distancing, contact tracing and limit surface transmission on site.
