Supporting Safer Manufacturing Through Digital Innovation: AVK UK’s Health & Safety Journey with EHSwise
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Standardise safety processes across every site with one connected digital approach.
Start with the workflows employees use every day to encourage faster adoption.
Choose software that adapts to your existing processes, not the other way around.
Operating multiple manufacturing and engineering sites across the UK, AVK UK manufactures valves, hydrants, fittings and accessories that support critical water, wastewater, gas and fire protection infrastructure.
As part of the global AVK Group, maintaining high standards of Health & Safety is fundamental to the way AVK UK operates.
With a strong focus on continuous improvement, the business is committed to creating safe working environments while ensuring its processes remain effective, consistent and accessible for employees across all locations.
A Step-by-step Journey to Better Safety
When AVK UK started their digital health and safety journey with EHSwise, rather than introducing every Health & Safety function at once, they adopted a phased rollout, beginning with the safety reporting functions employees use most frequently.
The first stage focused on digitising and simplifying Incident Reporting, Hazard Reporting and Rapid Fire Audits, with additional modules planned as the rollout continues.
Following the initial rollout, Paul Race, Operations Director at AVK UK, highlighted the positive impact of EHSwise in supporting a more consistent approach to Health & Safety management, across AVK UK’s operations.
Standardising Health & Safety Across Multiple Sites
Consistency is an important consideration for organisations operating across multiple manufacturing facilities.
Processes that work well in one location can quickly become inconsistent when different teams record information in different ways or follow different reporting practices.
For AVK UK, the objective was to strengthen consistency across everyday Health & Safety activities providing employees with a common digital approach across its UK operations.
Instead of treating incidents, hazards, inspections and corrective actions as separate administrative processes, the organisation wanted them to form part of one connected way of working.
The rollout was designed to support this objective, while ensuring the system remained practical and accessible for all employees across different operational environments.
Starting with the Processes Employees Use Every Day
The first phase of the rollout focused on the safety activities employees perform most often, beginning with core workflows.
Incident and Hazard Reporting provide employees with a standardised way of recording events and observations, regardless of where they occur.
Corrective Actions ensure that identified issues can be assigned, monitored and followed through to completion, while inspections are completed using the same digital environment.
Together, these workflows help create a more consistent approach to reporting, tracking and managing Health & Safety activity across AVK UK. Ensuring these workflows were simple and accessible was an important part of the rollout.
This helps to create standard process across the business while giving managers immediate visibility of Health & Safety activity.
Having standard modules available from the outset has allowed us to establish consistent Health & Safety processes quickly.”
Rapid Fire Audits: Tailored to Unique Requirements
AVK UK’s Rapid Fire Audits are intended to be short, focused workplace inspections that can be completed quickly while still identifying meaningful safety, housekeeping and process issues. As the name suggests, they are designed to take only a few minutes to complete and are not related to fire safety.
The aim is to encourage frequent engagement by supervisors and managers, making hazard spotting part of everyday operations rather than a periodic compliance exercise.
Over time, Rapid Fire Audits have become one of AVK UK’s key tools for hazard identification and continuous improvement.
The audits are now completed electronically through the EHSwise platform using QR codes, making them quick and accessible from the workplace. Issues identified during an audit can be raised, tracked and actioned in real time through EHSwise, providing greater visibility and clearer accountability for follow-up actions.
By making the process simple and accessible, the business has increased visibility of workplace hazards and generated more focused, actionable improvements.
Built to Support Future Requirements
As further processes are introduced, AVK UK will continue developing a connected approach to Health & Safety management, bringing key activities together within a single digital platform.
Looking beyond the current rollout, AVK UK also sees opportunities to apply the platform beyond traditional Health & Safety processes.
Paul Race, outlined the next steps:
“While the platform provides strong Health & Safety functionality, its flexibility also creates opportunities to support wider business processes in the future. We already have a large number of other use cases documented for the System beyond traditional Health and Safety, and we look forward to getting these rolled out at the soonest.”
The platform’s multilingual capability also provides opportunities for future deployment across the wider AVK Group.
By combining configurable workflows with multilingual deployment, EHSwise provides AVK UK with a platform that can support both its current Health & Safety priorities and future operational requirements.
One connected approach. Safer decisions every day
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