Asbestos management case study

Background

Founded more than 20 years ago, the Armac Group has grown to become one of the UK leaders in demolition, and land reclamation and remediation. Today the group comprises two companies – Armac Demolition and Armac Environmental – which together provide every service necessary to turn a derelict site into a cleared, safe environment ready for re-use.

Asbestos removal is a fundamental part of demolition work, and its proper management is essential to the safety of those working on a site, and those who’ll use it afterwards. Armac Environmental exists to manage asbestos removal to the highest standards throughout all Armac Demolition projects.

Challenge

As one of the UK’s biggest demolition companies, Armac typically works on large-scale projects involving major buildings such as schools or hospitals, and infrastructure including road and rail. Complex projects will often run to three or four months, during which time mandatory asbestos paperwork previously remained on site. This presented the asbestos Project Support Manager and his team with a huge challenge as the completed paperwork was returned at the close of each job.

Aside from the significant time lost to carefully processing the paperwork, the team was aware that effective analysis and review of its asbestos removal projects was only possible after it had ended. While acute issues could be addressed through site visits and supervisor feedback, opportunities were being missed to identify and address training needs and improve performance across the job as they happened.

Armac had been an Assure360 customer for some time, using core features such as auditing and exposure monitoring. When Assure360 Paperless launched, the company realised that the new app could offer a solution to the shortcomings of a paper-based system. However, as a major contractor with multiple accreditations, it needed to be certain that any changes to its record keeping and safety-critical processes were appropriate and effective, and that they would constitute an improvement.

Results

Armac began a limited introduction of Paperless on smaller projects, using it to replace conventional paper-based safety checks and record keeping. As a granular, data-based system, Paperless ensured that supervisors’ safety-critical checks were recorded digitally, and shared in real time with the office team. Supervisors were quickly freed from managing mounds of on-site paperwork, enabling them to spend more time supervising the safety and quality of the asbestos-removal work itself.

The benefits were immediately clear to the office team. Not only was it freed from hours and hours spent processing paperwork at the end of every job, it now had access to live data describing its teams’ performance on site. Able to perform analyses during jobs, rather than after them, the team could respond to emerging trends, ensuring that training and other resources could be directed to maintain quality, promote safety and ensure milestones were being reached.

Reassured that Paperless can replace on-site paperwork with a more streamlined and effective system, Armac is now deploying the app across all projects –

What the client said

It’s saving me hours and hours and hours of going through paperwork. It’s a lot quicker, and everything’s visible, so we can see everything as the project’s ongoing.

Say the exposure monitoring is higher than it should be, we can deal with that at the time rather than three months later when we get the paperwork back. If there’s an issue on site that hasn’t been picked up yet, it gives us an extra way to spot it and act before it becomes a problem.

The team’s very helpful. Very quick to respond. We’ve only had one issue: a supervisor who couldn’t log in on site. I called Assure360 and within half an hour it was all sorted out and we were ready to go.

Client name

• Johnathon Teague

Client role

• Project Support Manager