Asbestos compliance case study

Background

Royal Mail have been collecting, processing and delivering letters and parcels in the United Kingdom for over 500 years. It’s the UK’s pre-eminent delivery company. The workforce of 139 thousand postmen and women and support staff delivered some 17 billion items in 2015-16, using thousands of vehicles and operating from more than 2000 buildings across the UK.

The buildings vary greatly in size from the smallest of vehicle workshops to huge mail centres. As well as varying in size there is a broad age range for their sites.

Challenge

It’s a huge infrastructure, and coordinating suppliers and contractors to safely remove asbestos from the Royal Mail Group’s more than 2000 locations was a very daunting task for Asbestos Compliance Manager, Richard Bennion. Coupled with this, there was a requirement to protect Royal Mail Group’s good name and reassure the huge workforce that asbestos and asbestos removal was being managed safely.

Royal Mail Group required a system that would allow a very detailed look at how safely its asbestos specialist suppliers were operating, whether their work adequately protected the workforce and properties, and simplify the KPI measurement process.

Results

Assure360 allows a layered approach to auditing so that internal managers can audit as well as getting its external asbestos consultants to inspect. The result is a large number of inspections and training sessions for the Royal Mail Group team – effectively making them an expert client.

The dashboard gives access to everyone that needs it – including the contractors themselves, who can view their own audits at the touch of a button.

The audit findings drive Royal Mail Group’s KPIs and the contractor assists with the close-out of non-conformances. They are therefore participating in their own KPI process – making contractor review a straightforward, conflict free process.

Not only this, but Assure360 also tracked competencies at an individual contractor level, making it easy for Richard to confidently choose a high-quality contractor that he knew was up to the task.

What the client said

“The Assure360 database allows us to take a top level view of all of our asbestos removal contractors, directly comparing and contrasting them against each other. The audits are detailed but at the same time easy to complete. Inspections can be carried out by our own team, or selected partners – so we aren’t tied to a single consultant. Reports can be produced at the touch of a button. Assure 360 is the solution that provides a robust approach to compliance audits of our suppliers.”

Client name

Richard Bennion

Client role

Asbestos Compliance Manager