Engineering Company QUASi RICHTER

The engineering office QUASi-Richter provides consulting and support to comanpies working in occupational safety and environmental protection. The determination of relevant entrepreneurial duties as well as the monitoring of the relevant legal requirements in the companies are tasks which are taken over by QUASi-Richter. 

By implementing these legal requirements, solid conditions are created in order to preserve the physical integrity of all parties involved and also to prevent negative environmental impacts. QUASi-Richter scrutinizes existing processes and techniques in the field of occupational safety and environmental protection and compares them with the state of the art. The challenge here is to integrate legal requirements, standards and newly gained knowledge into the work process in an appropriate manner.

• founded in 2012
• 5 employees
• industries: mechanical and plant engineering, forming technology, oil and gas production, geothermal energy

Problem

Up to now, the customer’s crisis management team was personally informed about the crisis by the person on call by telephone. This was extremely time-consuming and there were also differences in the information content of the messages sent to the staff role holders and the other employees to be alerted. In addition, at the time before the introduction of safeREACH, there was no documentation routine to trace the initial alerting process.

Solution

With the help of safeREACH’s digital crisis management tool, responsibility for communication and procedures was handed over. Various alarm scenarios were created for convening the crisis management team. The person on standby merely triggers the initial alarm! Who is alerted and what information is transmitted has already been defined beforehand on the digital platform. Since the alarm is triggered in real time, we no longer waste time with personal calls and follow-up work has also become much easier.

How long have you been running the QUASI-Richter engineering office and what are the focal points of your company?

Since 2012 I have been running the engineering company QUASI-Richter in Willen/Aller (Lower Saxony). Our operative team consists of safety engineers, safety technicians, and one fire protection expert. The Celle region is well known for the large number of local companies operating in the oil and gas industry. In the safety and environmental protection support of these customers, the original professional roots lie in the safety work of my team. A part of our projects also deals with hazard prevention planning and emergency management.

Thanks to the recommendation of EMERISIS by one of our long-standing customers, I came into contact with safeREACH for the first time in the course of a consulting service in 2018.

What was the original problem and how could safeREACH solve it?

Prior to the introduction of the safeREACH alarm system and thus the introduction of a central and automated information routine, the crisis team was convened by our on-call officer personally and by telephone.

The disadvantages of this kind of alerting and emergency communication were:

• the person on call was strongly involved in this alarm routine and was only available to a limited extent to actually deal with the situation
• high temporal expenditure for alerting the crisis team
• no reliable documentation routine for the alert
• lack of transparency regarding the availability of crisis team members in the crisis room outside working hours

By using safeREACH, all the challenges mentioned have been overcome and the alarming process has been greatly improved. We use safeREACH for alerting the crisis management team, the extended crisis management team and as an internal means of communication in emergencies and crises. With safeREACH, we have found an alerting system that has proven its “suitability for everyday use” and has been accepted by the employees, especially by those in the crisis management team roles.

The crisis management team or the person on stand-by uses the safeREACH system to trigger alarms as quickly as possible. Are there any practical examples?

As part of the review of the alarm routines, employees were alerted using safeREACH. The function for confirmation of receipt and relies concerning the time of arrival in the crisis team room is extremely helpful and thus improves the initial crisis team work. Great!