Brendan White, COO of the Comply Group, sat down for a Q&A to discuss the start-up’s COVID-safety solutions and the challenges of safety-compliance in supply chain and logistics.
What is the Comply Group and what solutions does it offer?
Comply Group is an enterprise software-as-a-service business. We provide software solutions to large enterprises – as well as medium and small sometimes, but generally larger – with pretty complex requirements.
We’ve got a range of tools at our disposal. We initially started as a QR code check-in provider – so we did start out of a COVID-related need, although my business partner and I have run businesses similar to this in the past.
The Comply Group started out with QR code contact-tracing your appointments when the state government started mandating that people keep their name and number where they went for contact-tracing purposes, before any of the state governments built their own check-in apps.
We quickly grew to about 7000 or 8000 customers around the country – essentially using us to check in customers and stuff. And then when the state requirements mandated that people use the state government check-in apps, what we did was we lost essentially all of the small business customers, but most of the larger businesses still had their own need to capture this data.
For instance, companies needed it for different purposes around managing risks and safety within the workplace, so they kept using us and – since then – we’ve expanded out into a range of areas including vaccine registers to comply with state government mandates in certain industries.
We’ve got asymptomatic test tracking solutions. So, if you’re an organisation with a policy around getting your staff to do rapid tests every two days or twice a week, for instance, we’ve got solutions for that. And we also do some work in PCR laboratory testing as well.
It was probably two years ago that we then started broadenig our scope to encompass a range of non COVID related solutions as well – using the same kind of flexible, quick, web technology. Some of those solutions include journey tracking for long haul drivers – where there are safety requirements around notifying people where you are and when when you’ve arrived. We also do Health and Safety checklists, checklists for machinery and equipment and vehicles; so pre-start checklists. We automate a lot of that using QR codes and notifications and triage dashboards. And more recently, time and attendance as well.
So, you’re clocking out, you’re checking in with the QR code for COVID. But you’re also clocking on for your shift. The initial application had branched out into several new domains.
What are the key drivers causing business leaders to decide on new technology rollouts in the industry right now around COVID safety?
It’s probably two or three key drivers behind the rollout decisions that we’re seeing – especially in this industry and supply chain and logistics.
The first one is around state government mandates. So, when you’re an organisation, especially a trucking company, for example, if you’re crossing borders, and you’ve got staff in all states of the country, keeping up with the changes that that are coming out from state governments on an individual basis is a nightmare. And then implementing that in a business policy or process is even more challenging.
For example, where a state government suddenly says truck drivers need to have three doses of vaccine. That’s when the business – the directors of the business – have a responsibility to comply with that, and so they need to know what’s happening on the ground. So they come to us and they say, ‘Can you please help us roll out a solution that makes it easy for us to understand what people are doing and to ensure they’re following the rules? That is the number one driver in my view.
I think number two, is genuinely around the health and safety of people in the workplace. Aside from the usual insurance-risks considerations, it’s becoming a felt responsibility of business owners to reduce outbreaks on worksites to ensure worker-safety.
We have businesses coming to us talking about testing policies, vaccine policies, social distancing, capacity management, and contact tracing within zones of their businesses so that they can bring forward the knowledge of where an outbreak is happening or where a positive case has been, for example.
A lot of businesses are working hard to get on the front foot when it comes to managing outbreaks or potential outbreak-risks on-site.
How have you seen the introduction of your technology improve COVID-safety in the workplace?
I guess one would be the speed with we’ve we’ve been able to roll out – so the ability to have recorded going live with 3000 staff organisation in about 24 hours on a vaccine vaccine tracking project. So the speed with which we can just spin up a solution for these problems is probably the big one that our customers really appreciate.
And then the other big one on the product side would be our contact tracing solution, which may or may not be needed for too much longer depending on where the where the pandemic goes.
Essentially what we’ve been able to do with that one is having people checking into work sites in different zones using QR codes.
Sometimes the government health departments take a week or two to get back to people to notify them that they were in close contact with someone who was COVID-exposed. One of our solutions allows the business to do that within about a five minute period. So you can essentially type in the phone number of the person who’s declared their positive identify, who they’ve been in the spaces with, and send those people a notification telling them to take action.
That’s not something we’ve seen anyone else be able to do very easily.
What are some common pitfalls to avoid when rolling out technology like this?
There’s couple of big ones to look out for. One is underestimating the amount of manual process that’s required. And underestimating the privacy implications of some of the things that are starting to happen. So, for example, a large organisation that suddenly needs to check everybody’s vaccine status due to a government mandate. Once you get down into the details, you actually find that you need to start tracking medical exemptions and you need to be able to understand when those medical exemptions expire. You need to be able to quickly go and see whether someone has or hasn’t uploaded their vaccine certificate. And then if they have, sometimes people are uploading certificates that have other medical data in them – and suddenly you’re holding someone else’s private health information. Maybe it’s in an email, or maybe it’s on a desktop computer, and you start to lose track very quickly of what’s happening. So, that’s one thing we see a lot of companies working hard to keep up with – all these changing rules. But they must as it is a risk to the business at the end of the day. So, that’s a big one: underestimating kind of how much thinking there is required around getting it right.
Another big one is keeping in mind the social aspect of changes insofar as government rules are coming in that must then be imposed on and integrated effectively with your staff – which can sometimes cause a bit of tension.So we’ve been able to be relied on as a trusted third party that’s managing a process like that.
So, for someone working in a warehouse, for example, suddenly their HR manager asking them for medical medical information seems quite odd. So what we’ve what we’ve been able to do is have the company essentially outsource that whole process to a third party that’s built for this purpose. So, instead of directly asking for their medical information, it’s like, ‘Hey, please upload it to this portal where they’re managing it that way. They’re managing that independently for us.’ And people find it a lot more palatable to do that, in our experience.
What are some of the issues you’ve seen associated with casualised workforces in the industry?
From an end user perspective, it’s a bit challenging – especially in the logistics industry where people work, but where people are often contracted to different companies, and each company has its own system. So, you end up with three different apps on your phone for checking into very different places and it gets pretty unwieldy from a sort of a COVID point of view. There’s also a risk around people working in different workplaces and just increasing the exposure sites essentially. So we say quite often that there’s no clear solution, but there has been talk around creating some sort of check in solution that’s industry-wide or run by an organisation that’s across a lot of different parts of industries. So for example, there might be a healthcare workers’ checking system or there might be a transport workers’ checking system. But that’s obviously a very difficult thing to get off the ground. So, it hasn’t actually gone anywhere yet – but it’s a problem I think should and can be solved.
Where do you see some the usage of this kind of technology going in the next few years?
It’s going to be an interesting insofar as a lot of organisations that will have to deal with these sorts of issues aren’t necessarily at the forefront of using this kind of technology; are being forced to use things like QR codes and check ins and using your mobile phone to check in at the door.
Suddenly, that’s creating a shift in a lot of businesses to go, ‘Well hang on. Why aren’t we using this for other things?’ And that’s exactly what we we’re seeing. We had a company call up the other day and say, ‘We’re using your technology for check-ins. But actually, we want to notify the person more fully of the obligations they must meet when they check-in.
All of a sudden, that company that’s a manufacturing facility previously unfamiliar with this kind of tech now has the capability to start pinging around notifications and building efficiencies into their visitor management tools. We’re seeing a lot of that happening.
We’re seeing a lot of groups come to us because we’ve built something that’s really very specific that their existing software vendors didn’t have. So, they’re opening up to other options around web technology and new ways of of using tech.
SCLAA has been quite supportive of the Comply Group’s work of late. From your perspective at the Comply Group, how would you characterise SCLAA’s importance to industry?
I’d say it’s hugely important for disseminating information from a central place and for understanding industry trends.
From our perspective, it’s also been very valuable in understanding more about how the industry works at a detailed level.
In some ways we were new to the logistics industry two years ago – so we’ve been able to get a lot of support from SCLAA to understand how things work: where the different levels of organisations are and how things are interconnected in different ways and places.
In short, SCLAA provide us and the industry at large with greater understanding of how the industry works, the uniqueness of it, and the importance of all its disparate components.
For more information on the Supply Chain and Logistics Association (SCLAA), click here.