Author Archives: Monique

Workers Can Now Check Compliance in Mobile App

A new software enhancement to the Onsite Mobile App will lead to better overall compliance on your sites and projects.

Previously, the Onsite Mobile App was only able to be used by supervisors and team leaders. Now, you can elect for your workers to have access.

Once you enable this enhancement, workers registered in your workforce management solution will be invited to download the Pegasus Onsite Mobile App. In the app, they can see their work roles, competencies, authorities, and licences (right down to the document level) from the information found in their profile in your Pegasus solution.

Why is this important?

With the data they need at their fingertips, your workers will now have a complete view of their compliance, without needing access to a computer.

It empowers workers to take control of their compliance, which leads to better safety outcomes on your sites and projects.

Show Compliance to Others

Your workers will be able to show a digital record of their roles, competencies, and access requirements to others. This eliminates the duplication of processes and keeps records all in one place.

It provides another step in the risk management process to make sure compliant workers can show their records out on site.

Support At The Tap Of A Button

Whenever a worker has a question or needs help to maintain compliance to work for you, it’s easier than ever for them to contact Pegasus.

Tapping the ‘Contact’ button takes a worker to the details of the Pegasus customer support team. There’s a dedicated phone number, email address, and a link to the contractor information website.

Easily accessible information and access to support about their own compliance from their own device empowers your workers and improves overall workforce compliance.

Making Compliance Simple

At Pegasus, we want to make compliance simple. We know how important easily accessible, mobile solutions are. With this enhancement, we’re giving your workers access to the information they need, where they need it most—on site. Using technology to adapt workplace practices and increase overall compliance is what keeps us going.

If you want to know more about how this can be used to maintain the compliance of your workforce, talk to your Account Manager today about including this functionality in your Pegasus solution.

This enhancement has already been made available to a few select clients.

How a Workforce Management System Supports Your COVID Safe Plans

Imagine the following scenario.

One of your workers unknowingly comes to work while infectious with COVID-19. Days later when symptoms start, they get tested and return a positive result. You’re talking to government health officials and contact tracers, and now your workplace has become an exposure site.

You have two options.

Option One

You don’t have any accessible, useful data about your workforce. You don’t know who was on site, on what days and at what times. Your workplace is closed for deep cleaning. With no clear picture of who might be considered a contact, in an abundance of caution, your entire workforce is at home self-isolating. Several days, potentially weeks, of downtime will cost your business lots of money.

Option Two

You have a digital workforce management solution, like Pegasus. You can download the data of who was on site within minutes, handing it over to government health officials. With easily accessible contact information, you send texts and emails to affected workers so they know to get tested immediately and isolate until they return a negative result. Your workplace is closed for deep cleaning, and you’re open again in a few days.

We know which option we’d choose.

Co-Existing with COVID-19

As Australia reaches higher double-dose vaccination rates, restrictions ease and borders open, COVID-19 will continue to be a threat to health in the workplace. One you need to manage.

Your business needs a COVID-19 Safe Plan which must be followed in accordance with government health advice. WHS obligations include protecting your workforce from illness.

We’ve seen many of our clients implement their own safety measures to curb the spread, especially within the mining industry.

“The sites are taking testing into their own hands. They’re doing rapid antigen testing off their own back, every two to three days. Workers have to return a negative result to be allowed on site,” says Tim Workman, Pegasus Client Account Manager.

Such is the importance of good planning.

What’s Your Business Plan?

As we’re looking at the roadmap out of lockdowns, contact tracing will change as vaccination rates increase. This doesn’t mean there’s no risk—and workplaces will still be required to have their COVID-19 Safe Plans up to scratch.

You could decide in your workplace that even as things change, you want stay cautious and carry out your own tracing to do your best to stay on top of outbreaks on your sites and projects.

“These clients are prioritising safety. If they get a positive case on one of their sites, they’re going to want to have access to data like what is found in Pegasus to do their own contract tracing,” says Tim.

“If you get a positive case on your site, instead of saying ‘we don’t know who was here, we’re going to have to shut down’, you can get the data from the Pegasus system in minutes and only have to close for a short amount of time.”

The Cost of Not Investing

Investing in a digital workforce management solution might seem costly, but when you consider the financial impact to your business if you’re forced to close for an extended period due to a lack of available data, it’s a cost worth paying.

“Even if you only save yourself four days of closure, that will pay for the system in its entirety over a few years. The return on investment in this scenario would be fantastic,” says Tim.

How are you developing your COVID-19 Safe Plan? Speak to Pegasus today to discuss how we can help you manage your workforce risk.

October is National Safe Work Month—a time to commit to building a safe and healthy workplace. The theme this year is think safe. work safe. be safe.

During the month of October, we’ll be exploring how you can approach safety in your workplace by looking at each part of the theme. This week, we’ve looked at think safe.

think safe– is the first step to thinking about work health and safety, which covers the planning and forethought that Persons Conducting a Business or Undertaking (PCBUs) (such as employers and small business owners) must do to identify risks and maintain healthy and safe workplaces.

Farewelling Phil Charley: The Original Pegasus Developer

You may not know his name, but if you’ve used Pegasus software, you have Phil Charley to thank. Phil has been with Pegasus since the 1990s and is the author of our original software, Onsite Track Easy. This week, Phil is retiring.

One of the friendliest faces in the office, Phil happily talked to us about his years with Pegasus, his career before joining us, and what the early days of software development looked like.

Join us for Phil’s story, a rollicking journey which takes him from nursing to cattle farms, the Pilbara to Melbourne, and back again to the Hunter, where thankfully the original PegPal decided to dabble in computers.

“Software development was the career that was waiting for me that didn’t exist.”

As our original developer, it’s safe to assume software has been the sole focus of Phil’s career. Except when he finished school and went to university, there was no such thing as software development.

If you pick a career, it’s likely Phil has done it. After a year of studying law at University of Sydney, Phil was asked to join an acting troupe, performing live theatre in Sydney and Melbourne which sounded much more interesting. So to the stage he went. Following this, Phil took what can only be described as a non-traditional path – he went on to work as a psychiatric nurse, dabbled in leather work at the Argyle Arts Centre in Sydney, before working on a cattle farm in the Snowy Mountains.

From there, he and his wife Louise hopped on his motorbike to ride across the country—yes, really—where he started working as a labourer for an iron ore mine in the Pilbara region. It’s safe to say Phil has had an incredibly varied career.

Beginnings in software

“While I was working in the Pilbara, I wanted to do a university degree in software development, but there were actually none available in Australia for remote learning. That’s the era it was,” Phil says.

But when a position in the mine laboratory opened, Phil transitioned to the role of industrial chemist. It was during his time in the lab that Phil became acquainted with Hewlett-Packard computers and his foray into software began.

Lucky for us.

The original PegPal

After a decade in the west, Phil returned to the Upper Hunter and finally started his degree in software development. Phil then taught computer studies to adults through TAFE, and started his own business before first crossing paths with Pegasus, known then as Peter Eason Survey and Mining Services.

Phil installed file servers and network cabling in the Singleton office and eventually joined as a contractor when Pegasus began the fateful shift into software.

We might be a cloud-based software company now, but the early days of Pegasus software were a little more humble – a server on a Windows computer to be exact. Site access? That was a printed, laminated card, scanned with a barcode reader like a library book. These cards were used to record contractors logging on at mine sites and were quite successful – until expansion was required.

“When we went to a second mine site, there was absolutely no communication as they were standalone products running on Windows computers,” says Phil.

“It was at that point we realised the future of that product was going to be extremely limited unless we found a way to have a single repository of information that could be accessed at multiple sites.”

And so, the Pegasus we know today was born. And who better to lead our developers than Phil?

“I’ve had a mix of skills in the mathematical, logical area, and the humanities, languages area. That’s actually very good for software development. You need to be very logical and systematic, but also very good with languages.”

An early staff photo of the Pegasus team

Early days of the Internet

It’s hard to imagine now, with the internet being so ingrained in our lives and businesses, but at first people were slow to go online.

“It was seen as being unreliable, risky and generally not considered to be a good platform for basing any kind of business dependency on,” says Phil.

But young Pegasus knew that using the internet was the way to go. Phil lead a team of contractors to launch the first Pegasus internet-based product, Onsite Track Easy, in 2002, officially pivoting the business from contractor labour hire into a software as a service (SaaS) company.

“What’s happened in the last 20 years is an evolution that’s only been possible through the confidence and courage of the management team of Pegasus to pursue it,” says Phil.

“I wouldn’t have been in a job if it wasn’t for people who were willing to invest in the future of the product. I’m very grateful for that.”

Onsite Today

Onsite Track Easy has been developed for use on hundreds of client sites and most industries across Australia, and more recently, further abroad. The Pegasus development team has expanded to a large team working in agile sprints to deliver enhancements and new features. This expansion is probably not something Phil would have imagined in the early days in Singleton.

“I didn’t get my computer knowledge in the early days of my career; it was a bit later on,” he says. “Now within the software development team, we have many developers who develop across multiple languages, numerous platforms and people within the group specialising in certain areas of development. The team has gone well beyond my own strengths.”

While it was hard to gradually release the reigns of Onsite to others within the company, seeing the vision of management, especially CEO Adam Boyle, made it easier to do. Phil talks readily about passing on the baton.

“It was only really seeing that he had visionary awareness for what the product could become and where it could go. Once I realised that, I was really happy to loosen the reigns and let someone else have a go.”

Biggest highlight

“This isn’t my personal highlight really, because I don’t feel like I personally had much to do with it, but our acquisition by Avetta has been a huge highlight for me. Onsite has been very much like a baby to me. You’re involved and there’s so much to do with it as a young Onsite

And then Onsite got into the teenage years and got a bit recalcitrant, there were some hard things. But now it’s as if I’m seeing Onsite off on its own pathway as an adult. I’m proud of what it’s become. I know my involvement was there at the beginning, and there have been some significant influences by a lot of people.

That’s without a doubt the biggest highlight for me, seeing Onsite go global with truly genuine global capabilities which it can do with Avetta. “

What’s next?

Heading into retirement, we asked Phil what’s next. While plans to visit friends in Denmark have been put on the back burner, travel is still on the cards. After numerous visits between Perth and the east coast along the bottom of the country, Phil and Louise have more exploring to do.

“We’re going to buy a camper trailer and go on a trip over the top end of Australia,” he says.

A consummate gentleman, it’s hard to imagine Pegasus without Phil. He will be incredibly missed!

How Does Your Workforce STAY Compliant?

In the world of Pegasus, you’ll hear the word ‘compliant’ more than occasionally. But what does it mean and how do you get there?

Compliance, in the context of the workplace, boils down to following a set of rules. These rules can be individual workplace policies, standards, specifications workers need to meet to undertake their role, or law—such as the Work Health Safety Act 2011 (which we’ve unpacked here).

It’s simple when you think about it. You want the people working for you to be the right people for their roles (through training, skills, licences and qualifications). With workplace safety more important than ever, you also want to make sure everyone is up to date with your policies.

Join us as we look at how to get your workforce compliant, how Pegasus helps keep them compliant, and an often-overlooked avenue for maintaining compliance and improving safety outcomes.

Getting your workforce compliant

Workforce compliance is the reason why companies like Pegasus exist. With our workforce management software, we keep your workforce safe on site.

We help you sleep at night by pre-qualifying your contracting companies, making sure your workers are competent, providing inductions and training, only granting site access to those who pass those first three parts, and we even make sure the plant and assets on your sites are up to code.

Managed services helps your workforce reach compliance

When you partner with Pegasus, there’s a level of managed service you can come to expect from us (which we’ve laid out here). If there are only two things you take away from that in this context, it’s that:

  1. Business rules specific to you will help keep your workforce compliant. When everyone understands exactly what’s needed to achieve and maintain compliance, time is saved, and workers are on the job quickly.
  2. There’s a whole host of people at Pegasus whose job it is to help support the ongoing compliance of your workforce.

So, tell me: how do they stay compliant?

A benefit of the managed service element of our partnership is that our involvement is ongoing. We don’t walk away after the software implementation is complete.

Why is this so important? Because there’s no use making sure your workforce is compliant at the beginning if down the track, they’re not.

If an incident occurs, the Work Health and Safety Inspector doesn’t care about the compliance status of your workers six months ago—they’re interested in compliance today.

Because of this, any time training is due to be taken again, an insurance close to lapsing, and a licence set to expire, your contractors receive an automated reminder from Pegasus.

But wait, there’s something else you can do!

A really simple way to help maintain compliance and make sure your workforce is safe is investing in training.

On top of our brilliant LMS, did you know Pegasus has a ‘Ready-to-Go Course List’ where there is a whole slew of online customisable courses available for you to purchase? With continual learning linked to boosted performance, increased productivity and reduced employee turnover, online courses are a simple way to keep your workforce compliant and improve your business.

What are the benefits of online training?

1. Flexibility

Workers can train in a way and time that works best for them. It doesn’t matter if they use a Mac, PC, tablet or mobile phone, as long as they have access to the internet and a web browser, they can complete training from wherever and whenever suits them.

2. Higher Retention

Learning online boosts retention rates by 25 to 60 per cent, so your workers are more likely to remember and be able to implement what they learn.

3. Safe and Accessible

Alongside changing businesses, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we learn.  With increasingly dispersed workforces, classroom learning is on the way out.

Online learning allows you to train your workers no matter where they’re located, and decreases any risks associated with in-person learning.

4. Save Money and Time

Research shows corporate learning online takes 40 to 60 per cent less time to complete when compared to traditional learning. Online training can be delivered quickly. Workers can learn new skills and information almost immediately.

Does your workforce need training to help maintain their compliance? Talk to Pegasus today or download our Ready-to-Go Course List.