Introduction
This document provides best practices for a client user to set and document safety approvals at the project level.
Common thresholds that clients consider when evaluating a contractor’s safety risk in Highwire include:
- Is their Highwire safety score at 80 or above?
- Is there an absence of a critical safety flag(s)?
No clients today use the safety score as a pass-or-fail mechanism. It is not used to eliminate contractors from consideration. Rather, the Highwire safety score and flags are viewed as indicators of risk. They are used to facilitate important conversations with contractors that occur before award and certainly before work begins on site.
Example Approval Criteria
Although Highwire offers clients the flexibility to configure their own critical safety flags, below is a list of common critical flags that are often set by clients in the Highwire platform:
This next graphic shows how those critical flags, along with the overall safety score, can factor into a client’s approval criteria:
While each client can configure their own criteria for safety approval, the above provides a common scenario of the factors considered by clients during the approval process. The remainder of this article will focus on how a client sets a contractor’s approval within the Projects flow in Highwire.
Setting and Documenting an Approval
Once a client establishes their approval criteria, there are two ways to set and document the approval status of a particular contractor in Highwire. In a separate article, we detail how to set approval in the Profile tab. Here, we will provide a step-by-step guide to setting approval status in the Project tab. We will use a fictitious project, Jellwin Technology Center, and fictitious contractors.
- On the Projects tab, click on the project you want to set approvals for. In this example, Jellwin Technology Center:
- Once you’ve opened the project, you will see each section of the project flow across the top of your screen (note that if you do not use Highwire’s Finance module, then Finance Approval will not be available).
Click Safety Approval to view the list of contractors working on the project. In the Safety Approval column, you will notice a drop-down menu (highlighted with the red arrow below):
- By clicking the drop-down arrow, you can either approve the contractor or require additional conditions before approval. In this case, the client has configured their safety approval to include Approved, CAP Required, Needs Review, Approved with Cap, and Not Approved:
Project Level Comments
Client users can enter or review comments about a specific contractor at the project level. Comments provide a mechanism for client teams to share their experiences across their organization and are visible only to client users, not contractors. Common use cases for comments include:
- Documenting what went into the approval decision
- Items discussed directly with the contractor
- High-level elements included in a corrective action or risk mitigation plan
- Experience with the contractor on a past project
- To enter new comments or review past comments, click “View Comments” in the Safety Approval column as circled in red below:
- That will open a box that shows you any historic Project Comments and gives you the option to add a new comment:
- If you want to add a comment, simply click on the blue “Add Comment” button, type in your comment, and click “Create”:
Uploading Supporting Documentation
Prior to awarding work to a contractor that does not meet the minimum established criteria (or prior to allowing them on-site), plans are often developed and uploaded. This supporting documentation may include:
- Project-specific corrective action plans
- Conditional approval forms or exception documentation
Project-specific corrective action plans are typically developed by the contractor. Conditional approval forms or exception documentation may be completed by the client. The process for uploading supporting documentation at the project level is simple. Click on the upload symbol in the “Upload” column and follow the prompts:
In the next example, the client uploaded supporting documentation for Broten Electric. As shown, once a document has been uploaded, a blue download link becomes visible, and the number of uploaded documents is shown:
Click the blue download link to see the list of uploaded document(s) and to download the document to their device:
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