Falmouth Exeter Universities

Falmouth Exeter Plus (FX Plus) manages the shared services at Penryn Campus and Falmouth Campuses on behalf of Falmouth University and the University of Exeter (UoE). They provide a comprehensive range of services and facilities to support Higher Education learning and living.

With external contractors working over multiple sites, the organisation required a contractor management solution that would provide a structured and a consistent approach across both campuses, to improve and manage contractor compliance in the induction and booking-in process. To increase and ensure compliance, security, and safety on site, FX Plus needed an efficient and effective management system, to manage contractor inductions, while capturing essential contractor and visitor booking information.

The development team at Verature have worked with the Projects and Estates team at FX Plus to deliver a new system to innovatively manage contractors signing on and off-site; enabling FX Plus to gain overall control and visibility of contractor visits across their various campus sites, ensuring complete compliance during the contractor onboarding and induction process. Previously over reliant on manual and paper-based processes for contractor management and aiming to digitalise the approach, FX Plus understood there was a need to increase the efficiency of the completion and upload of RAMS and permits associated with bookings.

With the newly automated Verature onboarding process, the FX Plus team managed to out-perform their initial 60-day target of successfully onboarding their first fifty key contractors onto the system, achieving this target within the first two weeks of the system Go-Live date. With refined RAMS, Permit and booking approval workflows, the Verature system provides an efficient, cost-effective, and convenient way of managing, monitoring, and auditing contractor bookings and visits on site, enabling FX Plus to gain the control, overview and automation required. In the first quarter of the system being live, 90.49% of RAMS associated with bookings were approved more than 2 days in advance of the contractor visit on site.

Working closely with the Verature team, FX Plus, Falmouth University and the University of Exeter, have now developed a streamlined animated contractor induction video, with an automated online assessment process, requiring minimal input from campus staff, until the arrival of contractors on-site. The management team have the ability to run reports on contractor bookings and visits at any time, with a user dashboard providing the live status of all companies set up in the system. During the first six months of the system being live, there have been 593 contractor tradesperson Inductions and assessments completed, 152 companies’ set-up/verified and over 3,318 Contractor Visits recorded within the system.

The organisation is now innovatively managing the signing in and out of contractors using the Verature Kiosk Module ‘check-in’ function. This functionality enables visitors and contractors to check-in and check-out of site simply and easily, by scanning QR codes (provided through automated booking emails) at iPads located in three locations across the campuses. The bookings module ‘on site now’ function assists in enabling management to then continually monitor contractor attendance on both campuses simultaneously, further improving safety and security on site, with a detailed overview of all work being completed.