Small to Medium Enterprises (Small Business) are different to Large Enterprises in many ways. Some major industries such as building & construction, mining, and electical safety have specific laws in addition to the Work Health and Safety Law that applies to ALL businesses. The legal requirements and regulations which are the most stringent take precedence over any other similar law or regulatory requirements. By and large, WHS laws and standards apply to all businesses large and small.
The difference lies in the safety management systems that each type of business is expected to have in place. This is measured against a different set of standards for each type of business.
The difference lies in the safety management systems requirements
By their nature large enterprise or industrial businesses require much larger, more complex management systems in general and their safety management and document control systems are included in their overall enterprise systems.
The Compliance audit tool for Large Enterprise safety systems is a long, complex document.
For small business it is a simple one page checklist.
The checklist is ‘traffic light’ color coded so that you can see at a glance whether or not you have passed. The Green area indicates that you are doing the right thing. If your responses fall into the Amber and Red sections this indicates that you need to make improvements immediately.
Unfortunately, this can be misleading.
If you look at this checklist carefully you will see that the only way to demonstrate that you are complying with these requirements is to keep good records of your activities even though the checklist does not specifically ask if you have a document control system in place. In fact, nowhere in the legislation or codes of practice will you see document control mentioned in relation to small businesses. Unfortunately this is misleading because you do need to keep good, reliable, secure records of your WHS activities.
Experience has shown that when small businesses do not keep good records, up to date, and able to be verified, they will not be able to support their claims that they run a WHS compliant workplace.
Small business systems are not integrated
Most small businesses do not have access to enterprise software and so end up using different software programs to manage different areas of their business. For example, you might use Quickbooks or Xero for your accounting needs, you might use Excel for your inventory and price lists. But it is very unlikely that you will have one large system that handles all of these areas in the integrated way that an an enterprise wide system would.
So knowing all of this and wondering how small businesses could make sure that their WHS documents were in one place, were backed up, were controlled (time stamped), and were easily accessible by all workers, we created SAFTDOX.
A document management system is as essential to your business as your accounting software.
SAFTDOX can give you back your confidence and peace of mind with automated document control, ease of access to all documents, dependable backups, automatic time stamping and easy searching for archived documents.
Don’t be worried that you might be audited – Be Ready!
Get your own SAFTDOX portal today – click here.
