Contractor Management 101: Everything you need to know

• Prequalification of contractor companies, pre-vetting and checks on their health and safety information, insurance documentation, quality & safety accreditations and policies. This involves ongoing management of this information as well as regular reviews of risk and incident history.
• Managing the job order or project and communicating expectations and requirements of the job.
• Obtaining risk assessments, method statements (RAMS) and safety plans from contractors who have been invited to do said work.
• Obtaining details on what workers or subcontractors the contractor will be sending to complete works.
• Inductions. Inducting those workers and subcontractors with any relevant site or project inductions and ensuring they have seen and agreed to any site rules and safe systems of work required.
• Contractor and worker competency review; validate any training or skill certifications, licences and qualifications, to confirm workers are competent to complete the required job.
• Check-in and record access and egress on site with a final check on compliance and whether contractor are validated to work. Issue of passes and badges to evidence this, and enable regular challenge / spot checks of external contractors working on site.
• Issuing of permits to work for high-risk works, encompassing dynamic risk assessment of the job and job location.
• Monitoring of works, with regular safety checks and audits, that are recorded and retrievable.
• Recording and reporting on any accidents, near-misses or incidents.
• Ongoing awareness of who is on site, doing what and where to enable a recognition of any potential clashes.
• Performance management of contractors, their workers and subcontractors, with a process for recording site bans or misconduct to inform future resourcing.
• Checking job or project completion and ensuring the safety of the site when work has stopped. Ensuring any permits have been properly closed/cancelled.
• Ongoing verification of approved or preferred supplier register, validating that insurances and documentation aren’t expired and are kept up to date for key contractors, to ensure the smooth running of operations.

• Assure by Evotix
• Alcumus
• SkyVisitor
• Sinica
• Biosite Systems
• Heresafe (find out why Heresafe is the best in class solution to automate your contractor management process here.)

The consequence of failure to manage contractors, or poor management of contractors, is often the occurrence of an accident or dangerous incident. Individuals or companies found liable, because they failed to plan, properly instruct or assess the risks involved in the job and the competency of that contractor to perform the job, may be fined and prosecuted for negligence.

As well as personal and company risk of prosecution, comes the reputational damage to an organisation who has failed to meet their obligations and acted without due diligence. HSE regularly reports on the outcome of prosecutions following investigations into an accident or incident; often occurrences are avoidable if correct contractor management processes are properly followed and adhered to by both the contractor and the client.

Any company using contractors has health and safety responsibilities to those contractors as well as to any staff, visitors or clients that may be affected by the activities of that contractor when on siteTherefore any role in the business responsible for inviting or overseeing contractors to perform activities on site must be aware, and responsible for overseeing a robust contractor management process. Common functions involved with managing contractors would be: Maintenance, Health and Safety/ QHSE, Estates, Facilities, Projects and Engineering teams.

Manual paper-based systems lack efficiency, control & security, leaving you vulnerable to corruption & lost data. The are extremely susceptible to human error and are resistant to consolidation & merging, meaning gaining a real-time overview of the complete picture, or collating data for reporting, is often difficult, if not impossible.

Instead, using a system, data is secured behind login settings & user permissions, archived & retrievable. A good system will be adaptable for your workflows & to meet changing requirements in contractor compliance, ensuring procedural compliance at all times. While in-built workflows and mandatory fields and forms ensure standardised data input, with alerts& escalations processes removing the risk of human error when performing compliance checks.

Managing the process and all your data in one central cloud-based system helps ensure you’ve the information you need, where it comes to performing compliance checks, resourcing future jobs, performing on job safety audits or proving due diligence to an external auditor.

Heresafe is a contractor control system that helps businesses comply with health and safety standards by incorporating effective pre-qualifying features. It includes a streamlined system for managing the hired contractor lifecycle, from job booking and compliance evaluation to document control, an induction procedure, access control, permit issue and on-the-job audits. With built-in workflow, alerts and escalations, Heresafe provides private and public sector clients, cross-sector, with instant visibility over site activities, helping them to achieve continuous compliance in their contractor management process.