Southampton-based Orion Safeguarding is a family run company with over 36 years of experience in the security industry. Today, it is a leading provider of security services across the South Coast protecting a variety of premises from commercial, construction and defence sites to marinas and marina communities and educational establishments.

 

All security personnel at Orion Safeguarding are fully licenced by the Security Industry Association (SIA). The company is also accredited by the British Standards Institution (BSI) and is a registered ICO SafeContractor.

The search for an all-in-one technology package

Orion Safeguarding is dedicated to ensuring peace of mind for clients by providing unmatched levels of protection for their property, assets and staff at all times – often at short notice. Achieving this mission involves rigorous training and requires an efficient set of processes, especially when scheduling security personnel across multiple and diverse sites.

 

However, Orion Safeguarding’s existing patrolling system lacked the user-friendliness, advanced reporting and rostering capabilities the company needed. As the company continues to deploy staff across a growing number of larger sites and provide the excellent levels of customer service clients have come to expect, it needed a different approach.

 

After searching the marketplace for one technology solution that could cater for the specialist needs of the security industry and was designed with UK businesses in mind, Orion Safeguarding turned to SmartTask. Now administrative staff and guards in static and most recently, mobile patrols, use SmartTask as a central system for HR, payroll and rostering.

Time savings through automation

For Vicky Watson, Company Secretary and Administrator at Orion Safeguarding, deploying SmartTask has been “brilliant from a back-office perspective” especially when it comes to producing check call reports and the monthly payroll. Before SmartTask, ensuring staff were paid correctly and on time was an onerous task that involved manually sending out timesheets, waiting for staff to complete and return them. Then the completed forms needed to be checked against original rosters, questioning any anomalies, before finally inputting the timesheets into the payroll system and staff receiving their pay.

Vicky adds: “Now, I can pull up everyone’s roster and timesheets in an instant. I know they are all there and accurate and everything is calculated automatically saving huge amounts of time.”

Information all in one place

The SmartTask solution is extremely useful from both an administrative and operational perspective. In an industry where it is essential to demonstrate the proficiency of security personnel, the certificates section within SmartTask is a very powerful tool. Victoria can add vital documents such as driving licences, training and SIA certificates including expiry dates for each member of staff and align them with client premises. What is more, the system automatically alerts when these documents are about to expire so that Orion Safeguarding can continue to keep their staff and clients safe and compliant.

 

Before SmartTask, Orion Safeguarding required three different systems to gather information on security personnel. Today, everything is stored in one place, for example, all holidays are linked to rosters and all certificates are linked to client sites. It’s this ability to deploy the right-skilled people to the right sites that Vicky believes will prove “invaluable” as the company grows.

Advanced reporting improves client communication

Client reporting used to be sporadic especially for sites covered by mobile patrols. With SmartTask’s interactive Mobile Module reporting is now far easier. All activity is fully logged; every client receives a report of what’s happening at their site and there is no margin for error. Orion Safeguarding uses SmartTask’s electronic forms functionality to record and track incidents across the company and the incident reports logged in these SmartForms can be sent automatically to clients.

 

In addition, customers have access to a secure client portal, another way for clients to track Orion Safeguarding’s commitment to service levels together with details of upcoming rosters and who is due to visit their premises.

 

Keeping staff safe on the move

Orion Safeguarding’s operations are diverse with client sites including marinas, construction sites, car parks and farms where mobile phone signal can be poor, and security personnel working in isolation. Offering GPS capabilities and with information all in one place, SmartTask makes it easy to track and interact with lone-workers, so vital in the security industry. At the same time, all alarm responses can quickly be despatched and then tracked in real time, providing greater proof of service and accountability especially for mobile patrols, according to Vicky, “something that was not possible before SmartTask.”

‘Supersonic’ fast accreditation enhances future business prospects

Effective compliance management is by far the biggest – and most surprising – benefit of deploying SmartTask especially when it comes to providing evidence of security best practice standards to independent trade associations such as the SIA. The beauty of SmartTask is it automatically gathers evidence of daily activities such as check calls, incident reports, regular patrols and making sure tasks are completed. This is the same proof of service information Orion Safeguarding needed to provide recently as part of the SIA’s Approved Contractor Scheme (ACS) auditing process.

 

Vicky concluded: “SmartTask has made my job significantly easier and certainly helps with the smooth running of our operations. I can safely say that without SmartTask and the easy access to operational information it provides, we would not have passed the auditing process for ACS accreditation. SmartTask’s superior reporting capabilities combined with the team’s responsiveness in setting up a new escalation system in supersonic time, facilitated our success. “

“Thanks to SmartTask, we sailed through the SIA Approved Contractor Scheme audit, a milestone that allows us to apply for bigger contracts, win new customers and expand our business.”