How Appia Uses SALUS to Prepare for COR™ Certification
Michael Beevers, Finishing Superintendent & Internal COR Auditor @ Appia
Vancouver, BC, Canada
High Rise Development
Appia is a real estate development company that builds high-rise condominiums in Vancouver, Whistler, and Vancouver Island. On any given day, you can expect to find hundreds of steelworkers, concrete pourers, electricians, glaziers, finishers, and more on an Appia site. Finishing Superintendent and COR™ Auditor Michael Beevers has been working with Appia for the last ten years and oversees around 460 workers on his sites daily. Michael and Appia have been working with SALUS since its beta stages and have been core advocates of the program since they adopted it in 2019.
Appia holds a Certificate of Recognition (COR™) from the BC Construction Safety Alliance (BCCSA). The program rewards employers who take an active approach to workplace safety through yearly rebates and insurance savings. To stay compliant, COR™ members are required to perform annual safety audits using data from Field-Level Risk Assessment forms, which each worker is required to fill out daily. Before SALUS, all risk assessments were done by hand, on paper. During audit season, Michael and his team would spend weeks sifting through boxes of paper forms, reviewing thousands of risk assessments, and logging the data manually. Damaged papers, misfilings, and unsigned forms made this process daunting and tedious. Not to mention, the long hours spent sorting through paperwork took Michael away from his daily duties on site, delaying deadlines and eating up valuable company time.
Through the SALUS app, Michael and his team handle all of their risk assessment filings digitally. Each day, when workers arrive at the site, they click through the risk assessment questionnaire on their smartphones and answer any necessary safety questions. The forms are immediately pushed to Michael, who reviews, requests edits, and signs off on each form. Each trade requires a specific form, one for steelworkers, one for electricians, one for concrete workers, and so on. The SALUS app provides customized forms for each trade and ensures that necessary sign-offs are given before any work is started. At the end of the year, all Michael needs to do is load the annual data on his computer, fill out his audit forms, and his work is done.
By moving their risk assessment data to SALUS, Michael and his team have saved countless hours of paperwork and mitigated the risk of hundreds of safety violations. SALUS ensures every risk assessment form is filled out, approved, and stored for later review. This streamlined process not only allows Appia to stay COR™ compliant, reducing insurance premiums by hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it also allows Michael to focus his attention on production and keeping projects safe, secure, and on schedule. His current project, a 42 story building in Vancouver B.C. is scheduled to finish safely on time and on schedule.
“The efficiency of SALUS is the biggest benefit to us as a developer. There’s no waiting, there’s no lag time. It’s not an email that never gets looked at, it’s something that can be addressed. Without SALUS, we would be so behind the ball.”
