Preventing accidents, proactively

Created in 2002, RCI Safety specializes in proactive, behavior-based employee safety solutions. Rather than analyzing accident statistics, RCI Safety’s customers observe employees on-the-job, score their behavior according to a customized system, then enter and analyze the results via a web interface. “We prevent accidents by identifying the habits that cause them,” says Tim Boyer, Cofounder and Chief Information Officer. “Once that’s done, companies can inform and train employees about the dangers inherent in their behaviors.”

Seeking to make massive input manageable…

The company’s approach would soon transform the safety industry. But first, unique challenges had to be met. “On average, every accident is predicated by someone repeating an unsafe activity three thousand times,” said Boyer. “Large corporations can make twenty thousand observations a month, tracking over 200,000 events a year – and initially our forms weren’t scannable. They had to be entered by hand – which was slow, expensive and a barrier to adoption.”

To answer this challenge, RCI Safety used pre-designed forms and offered apps for hand-helds. However, these also presented barriers. “Hand-helds,” says Boyer, “aren’t certified for many work environments. And pre-designed forms are static and inflexible, so it took months of programming to get a new form to a customer if they wanted to modify a checklist.”

“The forms had to be specially printed, so a customer who invested in 100,000 forms wouldn’t want to change a checklist before using them up. To deliver the service and cost-efficiency customers deserve, we needed a way to dynamically create and print forms on a same-day basis.” RCI Safety also had other requirements for their static form replacement. Customization to RCI Safety’s workflows and support for multiple languages were important, too.

Powering a new and more productive workflow

Working with Criteria First, the RCI Safety team was able to implement FlexiCapture within just a few weeks. “The guys at Criteria First were fantastic,” says Ward. “They helped us create a solution for processing of forms that’s integral to our reporting and quality management systems.” According to Ward, a customer scans their completed forms and uploads them on a batch basis into RCI Safety’s system via the Web. The forms are then transferred to another server where FlexiCapture extracts the data and sends it to the right corporate folder for analysis and reporting.

The new system also delivers remarkable flexibility and cost savings. “FlexiCapture,” says Boyer, “gives us the ability to process forms generated and printed on demand. We dynamically create forms out of our SQL reporting services and print them on a same-day, real-time basis without being locked into a standard checklist. Even better, we can handle 25 languages on-the-fly.”

Ward adds: “FlexiCapture also eliminated a ton of cost and barriers to customers using the system. Even using forms that they’ve created, customers can be up and running in the same day. Plus,” he says, “the system is 90% accurate and makes verification easy. It automatically identifies uncertain pages and sends only those to the customer, rather than the whole batch. The customer then verifies them via the web, at their locale.”

Results

Today, RCI Safety supports safety management programs for 700 customers – ten of them Fortune 500 corporations with hundreds of locations in 48 countries. With the help of FlexiCapture, they are now better served using far fewer resources. And, as Boyer describes, RCI Safety is better able to expand business, too:

“We’re able to offer a lot more than the competition,” asserts Boyer. “Instead of building a one-off standalone piece of custom-program software for scanning, FlexiCapture has enabled a solution that is part of our overall business system. It gives customers a lot more functionality for what they’re working with. It’s a great value add.” And even better, FlexiCapture is proving ideal for global enterprises in yet another way: “If someone wants to process a checklist in twenty-five languages,” says Ward, “no waits and no problem.”