The nature of the industry – large vehicles operating on public roads, carrying members of the public – means that the company is bound by strict regulatory requirements to ensure business compliance.
The Pulitano Group is an operator of buses and coaches in Queensland and Victoria, running Bus Queensland, Cranbourne Transit in Melbourne’s south eastern suburbs and Victorian high country specialist carrier, Mansfield Mt Buller Bus Lines.
The nature of the industry – large vehicles operating on public roads, carrying members of the public – means that the company is bound by strict regulatory requirements to ensure business compliance.
This is even more the case for the Bus Queensland arm of the business, which operate urban and school services across greater Brisbane, Ipswich, the Lockyer Valley, Park Ridge and Toowoomba – all of these services are undertaken on Queensland Government contracts.
“ It’s not that we have a lot of incidents throughout our companies, it’s that WHS MONITOR™ has helped develop a reporting culture, the system makes it easy to report hazards as well as to implement corrective action plans.”
Ralph Cobban, National Work Health and Safety Advisor for the Pulitano Group
As the National Work Health and Safety Advisor for the Pulitano Group of Companies, Ralph Cobban, was responsible for introducing WHS Monitor to all operations. A 15 year veteran of the workplace health and safety industry, like many other users of the WHS MONITOR™ compliance management software system, Ralph went looking for a new product that would do the job better.
“We have been using Arventa’s WHS MONITOR™ since May last year and the main reasons why we wanted the system was to better manage risk and compliance areas: to minimise risk of injury to employees and customers, while ensuring we complied with all industry requirements and the more specific needs of our Government contracts,” Ralph said.
“Previously we had used a different system for a couple of years but we were finding that it didn’t meet all of our needs. It was also something that everyone had been told to use – there had been minimal training prior to implementing the system and buy-in from staff was poor.”
The Pulitano Group is using the complete WHS MONITOR™ system across its three businesses and Ralph said that the ability to customise the system and the excellent training provided has led to an enthusiastic response to the program company-wide, according to Ralph.
“Our initial contact with WHS Monitor was very positive and we were encouraged by the ability to tailor the WHS MONITOR™ system to our own requirements, and the process by which this was done was also engaging,” he said.
“We were able to get our management team involved from the outset, WHS Monitor held webinars for us and provided a great platform for two-way communication, which empowered us to customise the system for what we needed.
“Everyone was engaged prior to the system being implemented and this has yielded dividends in people’s willingness and enthusiasm to use the WHS MONITOR™ program.”
As well as helping get staff on-board to better manage workplace health and safety, WHS MONITOR™ was also able to deliver efficiencies over the previous system. Prior to selecting WHS MONITOR™, The Pulitano Group was using a separate business system to monitor unplanned events, effectively causing double-handling of data which caused resentment towards the system by some staff.
Ralph said that a measure of WHS MONITOR’s uptake throughout the group was the popularity of the Incident Management module which includes features such as trends analysis, claims processing, lost time rates, corrective action plans, incident reporting and assessment and much more.
“It’s not that we have a lot of incidents throughout our companies, it’s that WHS MONITOR™ has helped develop a reporting culture, the system makes it easy to report hazards as well as to implement corrective action plans,” he explained.
Another factor that has endeared WHS MONITOR™ to The Pulitano Group is its ease of use.
“Unlike the preceding system, WHS MONITOR™ is much more user-friendly and functional – anyone can pick-up and use the system, you don’t have to be tech-savvy or even a trained safety officer, the system is very intuitive and easily captures everything we need,” Ralph said.
“The information we capture also needs to be easily accessible, our Queensland Bus contracts are all with the Queensland Government who do annual audits as well as spot testing, and using the WHS MONITOR™ platform the data is simple to access.”
The product and training aside, another area in which the WHS MONITOR™ team prides itself is in aftersales service and support, and by all accounts the company is delivery on this front as well, according to Ralph.
“Support from the implementation phase to the present has been fantastic,” he said.
“The system we’ve found to be very robust and reliable, and there’s been an excellent effort to understand our business requirements. We highly recommend the WHS MONITOR™ system to others.”
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