At the onset of the outsourcing phenomena, organizations contracted out only mechanical or tertiary tasks, ensuring that critical functions remained entrusted with employees.
Over the past decade, this mindset among corporations— regardless of their size or industry—has shifted. Today, organizations are more willing to hand over key functions to contractor organizations and the workers they hire. By delegating more tasks, they add risk into their supply chains, as thousands of contractors and tens of thousands of their workers fulfill internal requirements while attempting to meet scores of environmental, health,business continuity,safety and regulatory mandates.
As the volume of regulations and their complexity grows, organizations need visibility into the risks that exist within their ecosystems. They need reliable information on the contractor companies they hire, ranging from their insurance policies, safety performance, financial health, and environmental sustainability practices, processes to meet regulatory requirements, and they need to know whether their hired workers have undergone approved training programs. Otherwise, companies would fly blind with little confidence that their internal requirements are being met by competent workers.
To mitigate and manage risks inherent to their third-party workforces, businesses turn to technology from providers in the supply chain risk and compliance management sector. This is where Veriforce is in a class by itself.
Drilling Down to the Worksite Level
While some providers focus on threats at the company level and others hone in on worker safety, Veriforce identifies and mitigates risk at three structural nodes: Company, Worker, and Worksite. “Unlike our competitors who stop at the company level, we also mitigate risk where the rubber meets the road, which is with the worker at the worksite,” says Colby Lane, the CEO of Veriforce. “This not only allows clients to assess the competency of workers (hired by contractors), but also offers risk mitigation tools to ensure the safety of the workers at the worksite level.”
“Our mission is to bring workers home safely from high hazard jobs, doing it in a way that drives optimal business performance, reduces the number of injuries and disruptions, and creates more efficiency and effectiveness for all stakeholders,” adds Lane.
Unlike our competitors who stop at the company level, we also mitigate risk where the rubber meets the road, which is with the worker at the worksite
“Our comprehensive platform and our processes are what makes our solution unique and powerful. We bring together all aspects of a client’s supply chain risk and compliance operations, and we verify all of the data that flows through it,” explains Jeff Muto, the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Veriforce. “With the Veriforce solution, our clients have an accurate, complete, actionable, and real-time view into risk within their contract workforce.”
In summation, Veriforce deploys its technology platform, data integrity verification practices, and standardized safety training programs to enable global firms to manage risk in their supply chains down to the worker-level.
Global Firms Rely on Veriforce to Create and Execute World-Class Contractor Risk Management
One such global corporation can attest to the value of Veriforce’s solutions. A publicly-traded oil and gas exploration company spent three years utilizing a risk management solution provided by a prominent Veriforce competitor. Although the product identified health and safety threats in the contractor base, it did very little to allow the client to work with contractors to address areas where risk existed.
The challenges didn’t stop there. The client received no programmatic support to mitigate the identified risk, so the client felt stymied in their efforts to create and execute a world-class contractor risk management practice.
This shortcoming was identified by the company’s new head of corporate risk management, who also noticed that 70 percent of the high-risk contractor base was non-compliant with the company’s insurance requirements. “He was amazed that the provider [our competitor] couldn’t or wouldn’t assist in improving their contractor compliance rate from 30 percent,” recalls Muto.
After stepping in, Veriforce helped enhance the company’s risk profile to get all of its contractors and workers up to speed in terms of competency, safety, and compliance.
Furthermore, the oil and gas firm wanted to harness analytics and integrate its risk management solution with Salesforce, requirements that the previous vendor failed to implement. Veriforce’s client-centric design philosophy and open-data architecture not only executed the integration but also enabled the client to provide other internal business practices with data.
Veriforce created an improved engagement model to help contractor companies and workers reach a compliance threshold that met the client’s needs. Within the first 18 months of working with Veriforce, the client upped its compliance rate from 30 to 90 percent.
Veriforce indicated that most contractors are non-compliant not because they ignore regulations but because they lack the knowledge about required practices. “This is why our business model is unique,” says Lane. “We have an entire army of people whose job is to work with contractors and ensure they’re moving in the right direction.”
A Network of Epic Proportions
Veriforce is more than just a team of software developers. It is the largest interconnected supply chain, safety, and compliance-focused risk network in the world. It also offers best-in-class client and contractor support and training to educate contractors so that they can perform at their best.
The vast network comprises over 800 hiring clients—including giants, such as Trans Canada and ExxonMobil—more than 50,000 contractor firms, and over one million workers, safety trainers and competency evaluators working in close quarters with contractors and workers. Muto points out that Veriforce’s network of 10,000 credentialed safety and competency verification specialists are not only certified through a rigorous process, but they are also audited regularly to ensure the quality of their work meets Veriforce’s standards. “Our clients trust in the quality of our processes and systems because they see the level of investment we make in them,” he says.
As an example, Veriforce’s certified evaluators are authorized to evaluate and sign off on federally-mandated worker competencies in the area of Operative Qualification (OQ). Typically, solution providers are not authorized to conduct audits, another reason why Veriforce stands out. To that end, VeriSource, Veriforce’s all-inclusive solution that supports OQ, unites software with value-added audit, consulting, and training services to maximize the effectiveness of OQ programs. The solution also enables pipeline operators to manage all aspects of employee OQ qualification tracking and recordkeeping within a single software application.
Veriforce acknowledges that data verification and data integrity is a perpetual process, especially since its clients rely on it to provide them with trustworthy and timely insights. Muto adds, “Not only do hiring clients have confidence that a top-quality evaluation process was conducted [by us], they also know that the data associated with the evaluations and their OQ programs as a whole are sound, well-organized, and audit-ready should a PHMSA auditor pay them a visit.”
The Confluence of Three Companies, One United Vision
Its degree of credibility has consistently grown since Veriforce’s inception in 1993.
Today, Veriforce is a product of three companies: Veriforce, PEC Safety, and ComplyWorks. In 2019, Veriforce merged with PEC, a leader in delivering safety and compliance solutions to vertical markets such as oil & gas, renewable energy, and utilities. In early 2020, Veriforce acquired ComplyWorks, Canada’s leading compliance management solution provider.
Through these acquisitions, Veriforce has bolstered its vast network and global clientele, which now includes leading companies in more than 120 countries. According to Lane, the triple alliance is all the more special since all three firms have “authentic founding stories” and have shared a common vision—for several decades—of mitigating risk at the worker and worksite levels. “All three companies were founded by industry experts to solve complex and important problems. Our combined, deep domain expertise is simply unmatched in the industry and critical to how we solve problems,” he notes.
In engaging with various high-risk industries, such as manufacturing, construction, chemicals, environment services, and transportation, Veriforce also realizes that a one-size-fits-all risk management solution isn’t effective. Therefore, it designs tailored solutions and gives clients the option of either choosing contractor management (company-level), operator qualification (worker-level) and standardized safety training programs—or an integrated solution with aspects from all three elements.
Drive for Innovation and Platform Enhancements
For 27 years, Veriforce’s solutions have enabled organizations to centralize and streamline critical compliance processes, efficiently manage their contractor workforce, and effectively mitigate regulatory and supply chain risks while driving constant improvement to safety.
Marching ahead, Veriforce has no plans to rest on its laurels. “We are passionate about getting feedback from customers to enable us to drive innovation,” says Muto. To that end, Veriforce is working on platform enhancements to improve mobility, usability, and performance management functionality. Recently, Veriforce introduced predictive analysis capabilities to its platform, which alerts clients of risks in advance. This feature, Muto notes, is a top priority for Veriforce’s product and engineering team over the next 12 months.
Besides platform enhancements, Veriforce intends to add to its list of training modules, which already includes over 400 online courses. Geographical and vertical expansion also top Veriforce’s roadmap agenda. Lane adds, “Any market where there are big projects requiring a lot of contractors and high-risk work is a market where we can thrive.”
On a closing note, Lane stresses that Veriforce is “not a team of random software developers building stuff,” but rather a mission-focused organization that has its finger on the pulse of the EHS segment. “Our contractor-focused segment is really a network business, and we add a ton of value by connecting contractors, hiring clients, workers, and safety professionals,” he says. “We have proven that it’s not just about building the best software, but about building the best toolset and strategy.”
Headquarters :
The Woodlands, TX; Covington, LA; Calgary, Canada; and Pretoria South Africa Management
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