OTB Streamlines Safety & Security Certification

A large, rapidly growing transit agency was facing a massive light rail expansion. They knew their manual safety and security processes could not take the strain, nor continue to comply with the new regulations and requirements coming from the FTA for the construction project.

The Challenge

Safety and Security had been managed through a disjointed set of manual processes, emails and spreadsheets that had served the organization when it was smaller. But these tools would not scale to take on a major construction project. Data and documents were scattered and difficult to find, there was no way to create reliable status reports, and audits were becoming an ever-growing drain on limited agency resources.

What was at Stake

Safety and Security Certification is a critical piece of any new construction project. Delays in certification can delay an entire project schedule, and even small mistakes can create setbacks and cost overruns. FTA funding increasingly depends on having robust safety and security processes in place. With the approval of a $52B light rail extension, our client’s budget and scope of responsibilities ballooned. The safety and security certification team faced needing to hire a significant number of additional resources and still were concerned about the errors and delays manually managing all this paperwork.

The Solution

OTB’s SSIMSTM pulls all safety and security items into one place, allowing hazards and mitigations to be tracked and managed from preliminary engineering, through final design, construction, testing, and into revenue operations. SSIMSTM can accommodate:

Seamless reporting on safety/security progress at an item, system, project, or agency-wide level.
Secure, searchable document storage with automatic metadata tagging
Regular tracking of all approvals, including the exact data and document versions used to make each decision.
Automatic creation and routing of required certification documents
Effortlessly managing safety & security for over 20 light rail projects, including over 4,000 hazards and mitigations

Results

The safety and security certification team was one of the very few in the agency that did not need to hire additional resources during the massive construction project. Following their success, the agency leveraged the highly flexible SSIMS™ tool to add vehicle certification and substance abuse tracking modules.

OTB’s Unique Approach

SSIMS™ combines custom forms, advanced workflow, document management, and real-time reporting into a powerful SMS management tool that can manage any sized project, or any part of the project life cycle. Thanks to OTB, the agency now manages the entire safety and security certification process in one place. This has allowed them to reduce the introduction of errors inherent in multiple, duplicated lists; and effortlessly report on the status and life-cycle stage of their items and projects. They have dramatically reduced the effort and risk associated with their annual and triennial audits and can face new expansions confidently, knowing that the technology can scale with ease.