Improving Safety with Microsoft Power Platform
BRIDGESTONE
Landscape
Bridgestone Australia has a strong commitment to safety, which has been embedded in its mission statement since 2012 and delivered throughout its whole value chain. Safety procedures dictate that all business operations are required to complete scheduled safety and audit checks on various machines and equipment. These checks are also performed in their retail stores, warehouses and operations centres throughout Australia and New Zealand to ensure that safety is of the highest standard.
A common challenge in organisations committed to providing safe working conditions is the management of these tasks, which are notoriously paper-based, time-intensive and involving numerous stakeholders. Additionally, Bridgestone’s Retail and Warehouse site managers, Regional managers, Health and Safety management teams did not have a clear and simple tool to review these tasks efficiently.
Bridgestone Australia recognised the need to enhance and where possible, automate, its process around the safety aspects of the business and engaged Chamonix Consulting to assist in rethinking their whole approach to safety systems management.
Solution
The Bridgestone and Chamonix teams worked together to evaluate existing processes and determine how they could be reworked and improved. Considering the end-users experience was paramount to the success of the new solution. To great extent, end-users wanted a simple and efficient system, as they are accessing either via a retail computer or a tablet. As the business is split over multiple countries, regions, and types of operations, designing a seamless user experience was key to unlocking high engagement and uptake, ensuring simplicity in user interaction, and guaranteeing that key information and messages were being related to those who needed it.
Following the assessment, the Microsoft Power Platform was chosen to develop solutions to improve the business operations as they allowed rapid development using a low code business application platform. This solution integrates with dashboards and interfaces in Office 365 environment and can run natively on mobile and table devices.
This solution also enabled Bridgestone to achieve:
Effective Communication
Central portal for information delivery with integrated solution for user engagement, ensure a single point of access for a streamlined user experience.
Auditing Adherence
Modern business application enables users to clearly see what is required to be completed with alerts and notifications built in; the simplified user interface ensures quick completion.
User Engagement
A modern integrated portal for safety message delivery and business application access with single sign-on through Microsoft 365, delivered on all device sizes removes barriers once present with separate systems and access restrictions.
Business Benefits
Improvement to culture
Improvement to culture, especially in Safety, which is hard to quantify, though its expected adherence of safety checks will increase, and the right information and messages will get to the people who need it.
Management effort of safety systems
Management effort of safety systems and the required site activities are greatly reduced for both Regional Managers and Safety Management teams regarding overview of activities, reporting and distribution of messages and information.
Utilisation of Subscription Licence
Bridgestone is deriving significant value from its investment unlike many organisations that are paying for Microsoft 365 and not utilising the full functionality of the subscription licence which includes the Power Platform to deliver high-quality, rapid development of low-code business applications.
