Going Paperless: 10 Reasons to Join the Risk Assessment Software Revolution

Tired of paperwork? Learn how to streamline your risk management activities to save time and money by going paperless with the help of the right risk assessment software. With multi-layer cybersecurity protection, better visibility across the board and an environmentally-friendly approach, there is a lot RiskMach can bring to the table.

Think this is something your business could benefit from? Let’s dive in and find out what are the 10 reasons to go paperless and join the risk assessment software revolution!

1. Never lose risk data again

The biggest issue with risk assessment paperwork is the sheer amount of it. For a large business with hundreds of assets and thousands of risk assessments done every year, finding the right documentation when you need it is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

According to the official UK health and safety guidelines, you must keep a detailed record of the risk assessment history of every piece of machinery you own, including details of each risk assessment done and the measures taken to mitigate each risk. Those records can be requested by the relevant H&S authorities during a routine inspection or in case of an accident at work.

So, imagine having to search through a physical archive to find document #11 for asset #345 which has (probably) been filed five years ago. The task would not only be time-consuming but also extremely difficult to do if your filing system isn’t perfect. Not to mention, you are facing the danger of files having been misplaced, lost or destroyed by accident over the course of the years.

With RiskMach’s risk assessment software, you won’t have to worry about this – all your risk assessment data will be organised and kept safely in a digital Vault for at least 10 years. There you can find anything you need in seconds with a simple search

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The more assets you own and the more your business grows, the more overwhelming the admin side of risk management becomes, especially knowing that your risk assessment field can be requested by the relevant authorities at any point for a decade. With RiskMach, you won’t have to worry about losing essential documents any more – we keep it all safe and secure in our Cloud storage space.

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When you carry out risk assessment services for various companies over the years, keeping an organised paper filing system of those thousands of risk assessments for each client becomes nearly impossible. RiskMach saves all that information for you in one, safe, organised and easily accessible digital storage.

2. Keep track of changes to risks as they happen

The only way to stay on top of your risk management responsibilities is to be alert and responsive to all new developments related to risks in the workplace. This could be anything from keeping track of new risks found to the controls implemented and new evidence being provided.

Doing all of this using paper documents puts you a step behind. The time it takes for information about changes to risks within your organisation to reach you through the various levels of management in between may take days, even weeks. That’s time that hazards are potentially not managed adequately, which means the people you are responsible for may be exposed to various levels of risk. This, in turn, could make you personally liable for any harm caused as a result, under Section 37.

Going paperless protects you from that by ensuring an instantaneous flow of information. Printed reports will no longer be sitting on various desks within the organisation, waiting for their recipients to read them whenever they have time. RiskMach’s Cloud-based platform gives you updates about any changes to the risks and the related controls, as they happen.

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The first step to staying on top of your compliance activities is having complete visibility of how your risk management strategy is progressing. Being informed about changes to risks as they occur puts you in control and speeds up the process. This is why RiskMach is designed to notify all relevant people as soon as an update has been made, whether it’s new evidence added by a team member or a risk evaluation that has been amended.

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Clear and transparent communication is always valued in client relationships. The RiskMach platform offers an instantaneous connection between you, your clients and their team. Without middlemen and tedious email chains, the system allows you to inform your client about your findings and get feedback in real time. You will also get notifications as your client implements control measures to the risks so that you can offer expert advice.

3. Get visibility of your entire risk history

Knowing what is going on within the business as it happens is only the first step. Retaining the same level of visibility for the legally required period of ten years is another challenge that you need to tackle.

We already talked about the difficulties of doing that using a traditional paper filing system and having to search for information on numbered assets in hundreds of files on shelves and in boxes. You could argue that digital filing systems are a good enough solution to this problem but the reality is that they simply cannot stand up to a specially designed risk assessment software tool, such as RiskMach, purely because they don’t have the same indexing capabilities.

The way information is stored within the RiskMach system allows you to track changes to risk historically. For example, even if an asset has moved from one area to another, you will still be able to quickly access risk assessments conducted while it was still in its original location. This simplifies the process immensely giving you peace of mind knowing that you can easily show evidence of your compliance with industry standards and regulation if needed, at any point within a decade or more.

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As a business owner, you carry a responsibility for the health and safety of everyone at your workplace. If that wasn’t a burden heavy enough, you also have to be able to prove your compliance with the industry regulations upon short notice if requested by the authorities. If that happens, the extensive risk history kept by RiskMach is readily available to support you with detailed information about your compliance activities.

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Tracking risk history can get messy when you work for multiple customers, each owning several areas, buildings and numerous assets in each one; especially when said assets have moved in a different location since your last visit. RiskMach’s innovative indexing structure allows you to track all of those changes in seconds, so you are never taken by surprise when you do your inspection.

4. Improve communication within the business

Communication is key to a successful risk management strategy. This is why RiskMach’s risk assessment software is built with the idea to facilitate collaboration. Hosted on the Cloud, your risk information is visible to every responsible person, anywhere in the world, at any time. Also, everyone receives a notification when a change is made to a risk that’s relevant to them. This allows for staff and stakeholders to be constantly engaged and contribute to the risk management process.

By keeping your co-workers informed and staying informed yourself, you are both ensuring you have visibility and control over what’s going on but you also make sure that a great level of risk awareness is maintained throughout the business at all levels of the hierarchy. This makes for an iron-clad, modern risk management model that would be impossible without the implementation of risk assessment software.

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RiskMach offers a seamless, instantaneous flow of information between the business management and everyone else involved in the risk management process. The remote-working, multi-device capabilities of the software mean that risk management is no longer slowed down because the information hasn’t been passed on to the relevant parties on time. It also allows you to oversee the process in real time and intervene if needed.

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The ability to offer great communication between you as a service provider and your customers may be the thing to set you apart from the competition. RiskMach allows you to share information about all risk activities as they happen with the relevant people within the business and notifies your clients as soon as the work is done, so you can offer them detailed proof of everything that you have done.

5. Give relevant people access to all they need

Part of making sure that risk assessments serve their purpose is to inform the relevant people of the hazards found and how to avoid them. Having a paper filing system where reports are printed and put away in folders but no one sees them can’t achieve the necessary level of awareness. This is why more and more businesses are implementing various apps and software to cover different parts of the risk management process. However, every new digital tool you introduce sends notifications to alert people of every process it tracks. Often these notifications aren’t all relevant to all users, plus, some tools will have overlapping functionality, so potentially your employees could be receiving dozens of notifications every day, with the majority of them being either irrelevant or duplicate information.

Constantly bombarding your staff with irrelevant information is a serious problem in its own right, as it gradually chips away at people’s attention span and eventually makes them numb to this entire multitude of notifications. This type of fatigue leads to important messages being lost among an overload of irrelevant noise.

RiskMach’s risk assessment software combats that by offering an all-in-one system for all your risk activities, so you don’t have to worry about duplicate information. It also gives you control of who has access to what information, allowing for a precise risk management process to be designed so that the relevant information reaches only the people it affects.

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One of the great successes of a business owner is achieving outstanding productivity levels for all your staff. By using RiskMach as an all-in-one tool for your risk management activities, you streamline the flow of information, so that the relevant people have instant access to the data they need. At the same time, you also reduce the danger of your sensitive business information being exposed to cyber attacks by implementing conscious access control.

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Have you ever struggled with getting access to all the apps, spreadsheets and tools that each different client uses, especially when every client has risk assessment information stored across multiple digital platforms? Thanks to RiskMach, this won’t be an issue any more. Once you have introduced your customers to the RiskMach platform, you can easily share the relevant data with anyone within the business who needs to be involved in the process.

6. Ensure standardised input for all risk assessments

Although there isn’t a set format for risk assessment record-keeping outlined by the UK Government, all risk assessments must include a list of details that are necessary to prove your regulatory compliance and that adequate risk management practices have been implemented. The problem here is that when different formats are introduced and used for the risk assessments within your organisation, things can easily get missed.

This is a very common problem for businesses that use multiple external service providers to carry out their risk assessments activities, as different providers would likely have their own templates and would present the data differently. However, at the end of the day, all risk activities have to be logged in the same system on your side, so having a common template for both internal and external assessor makes the process much more effective.

Using a designated risk assessment software, you ensure that all risk assessments are done using the same standardised data input, which not only makes it easier to track and understand what has been done so far and what still needs to be done, but also that your risk assessment documentation contains all the legally required information to ensure regulatory compliance.

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Have you used more than one different machine safety expert to do your risk assessments over the years? Then you’ll know that the various people you work with will use different templates for the same assessment. This makes it hard to log the information in your system and keep track of everything that has been done. Using RiskMach you avoid that by using one standardised input that any relevant person you appoint can use, providing consistent information over time.

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Thanks to the standardised data input offered by RiskMach, you can conduct risk assessments knowing that all information needed to achieve compliance is covered. You won’t need to design or constantly update an existing template every time something in the legislation changes because we do it for you.

7. Protecting your data integrity

We all know that traditional paper reporting is prone to human error. There are multiple steps involving manual handling of information involved and at each of those, mistakes can be made. Most businesses are already keeping some form of digital records of their health and safety activities, yet, that doesn’t necessarily take the paperwork out of the equation.

How does your risk data enter your current system? Do you still have people with flip charts and pens, walking around your premises, writing down risk information on various checklist print-outs? Here’s your first point of manual data handling and the first stage where errors can be made. Even if flip charts have been replaced by tablets with the same checklists on them, the data collected will likely have to be manually transferred to a few different places, including numerous spreadsheets used for reporting.

Simply having to move the data from one system to another opens up the door for more issues to occur. Mistyping a number or copying the wrong column on a spreadsheet can make your reports unreliable, meaning that you could be basing important risk management decisions on incorrect data. To prevent that from happening, the RiskMach risk assessment software has been designed to intuitively organise the data by attaching controls to risks and adding notifications and evidence in the same place, negating completely the need for double-handling information.

Once entered into the system, your risk data is connected logically to mirror the real-life structure of your locations, assets and people. Reporting is also done using the same system and the same data input, which means that the integrity of your data is protected throughout the entire process.

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Protecting your data integrity begins with reducing the risk of error due to human mistake or loss of information. RiskMach can help you do that by limiting the data handling to one single data entry. Everything else that comes after from collaborating to reporting happens within the system, ensuring that the initial data doesn’t get damaged as it is used.

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Imagine data entry, data sharing and reporting, all in the same system with no need to switch between paper, various apps or using emails and other communication tools. You can do all that with RiskMach, ensuring that data is handled in the most efficient and straightforward way possible to provide a reliable service to your customers.

8. Next-generation data security

From wear and tear over time to documents being lost during an office move, or losing track of a file because the person who has organised the filing system has left the business, as well as damage due to environmental factors such as damp or fire, plus, having to manage the physical access to a secure storage space – there are a lot of things that can go wrong if data is saved in paper format.

However, with more and more businesses moving into the digital information age and storing their sensitive data on the Cloud or on their servers, there’s another major threat to worry about – cyber attacks. With 2021, having been predicted to be the year of ransomware attacks and with more and more phishing attacks targeting remote workers, ensuring that your information is safe is of utmost importance.

To prevent your paperless risk assessment records from being stolen or held for ransom, the RisMach software uses advanced password encryption and makes automatic backups of your data, so you can recover your information in case of a breach. Also, with the ability to control user access within the app, you can implement better internal security practices too.

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Data is a highly sought after commodity and hackers know that. To protect your information, as well as your company’s reputation, you need to implement sufficient and adequate cybersecurity protocols. The RiskMack software helps you do that thanks to its sophisticated, inbuilt defences.

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Cybersecurity has become a major concern for businesses across the globe, so it’s important for you as an external service provider to be able to reassure your clients that you can still keep their data safe in the digital space. The multi-layer cyber defence that RiskMach is equipped with allows you to do just that.

9. Get more time to scale your business up

The bigger a business grows, the more valuable your time becomes, as it quickly turns into a rare commodity. Scaling up an organisation means more responsibilities and more issues to take care of, so any tool that can streamline the processes used every day is a welcome improvement. We help you take time away from admin and channel it into growth.

Going paperless, using the combined risk assessment and asset management capabilities of RiskMach, allows you to optimise the entire risk management processes, making it faster, better documented and easier to complete. With no administration bottleneck to worry about and with all updates being seamlessly presented to you as they happen, it frees up valuable time, which you can invest in planning the future of your business.

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Risk management doesn’t have to be an extremely time-consuming and stressful process. RiskMach saves you time by making the process easy for everyone involved. That gives you the freedom to focus on other areas of your business and invest in its future development.

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Using RiskMach you drastically reduce the time you spend on admin and paperwork. This frees up your time to offer services to more clients, allowing you to expand your clientele and scale up your service offering.

10. Protect the environment

Saving you time, storage space and money in printing costs paperless risk management is great for business in its own right. However, going paperless isn’t just good for the future of your business but it is also a commitment to a better future for the generations to come. With an estimated 70% of all office waste being attributed to paper, transitioning into a paperless office model is something that every environmentally-minded business owner should consider.

The idea of eco-friendly printing has been circulating for years but the reality is that the efforts made to implement green practices, such as using recyclable paper, for example, has barely made a dent in the negative impact printing has on global warming, air pollution and the environment as a whole. Employing digital risk management software could be the first step you can take towards a modern, paperless office. It gives your clients, partners and customers one more reason to choose you over the competition.

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Environmentally-friendly businesses are the future and you can be part of it by joining the paperless revolution with RiskMach. It’s a great way to not only make an impact on the world but also to build your brand image as an organisation committed to bettering the world.

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In the day and age we live in, competition is at an all-time high. Being able to offer a distinctive, forward-thinking service is a sure way to get noticed by potential clients. Using a completely paperless risk assessment system, such as RiskMach, demonstrates you have a modern, eco-friendly approach that business owners would be happy to be associated with.

Want to learn more about going paperless with RiskMach’s risk assessment software? We work both with business owners and compliance service providers. Speak to us today and find out how we can help you revolutionise your risk management activities.