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STARK Connect

stark connect – an effective and efficient way to track environmental, health & safety issues in the workplace

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The brief.

Allow staff, contractors and site visitors to quickly and easily observe and track EHS conversations at any STARK location in the UK & Ireland.

With STARKs acquisition of Saint-Gobain Building Distribution Ltd, they entered the UK market, acquiring over 600 branches and distribution centres in the process. This meant they had an urgent need to reliably track and analyse health & safety conversations across their UK sites. It was immediately obvious to the STARK team that they needed to evolve and re-provision the proven SMAT Connect platform that many of the same staff had become accustomed to at Saint-Gobain.

The STARK Connect platform needed to stay true to its previous incarnation to allow staff familiarity, and thus preventing any retraining to be required, allowing users to hit the ground running. However it needed tailoring to the STARK brand, and required some additional functionality alongside tweaks to existing functionality. There was also a complete backoffice swap to allow integration with a different set of internal systems.

Standout features of the STARK Connect platform include;

  • Creation of safety conversations with photo or video evidence. Submissions notify staff and line managers automatically via email. Conversations can be automatically geo-located to your location, choosing the closest STARK site based on proximity.
  • Ability to analyse previous conversation information, including pointing out primary concerns across the task and activity observation database. This can be filtered to specific brands, sites, counties and regions, etc.
  • Ability to point out locations on a map which have a high volume of risks. Ability to check which tasks and activities are not being observed regularly.

challenges.

Workday integration

Bespoke integration with enterprise HR

Platform familiarity

A new look, but a familiar experience

Robust and efficient

Based on a tried and tested platform

our approach.

First of all we tackled the challenging pieces, such as hosting, IT integration, data privacy and security. In big corporations such as STARK, we know from experience how tricky these parts can be and how important they are to get right.

We implemented our production & staging platforms and devops pipeline into STARK’s existing Microsoft Azure environment, ensuring STARK IT had full visibility, ownership and management of the resources required. We know this is extremely important when dealing with sensitive data.

Once we had these aspects nailed down we moved onto the Workday integration (for staff information) and SSO integration, using Azure AD. These were critical to the application so required numerous rounds of testing to get exactly right.

Finally we moved onto imprinting the STARK brand to the platform along with feature additions and modifications. These were straightforward given that the team already has plenty of experience working on the platform.

Since launching to all STARK UK building and distribution staff in April 2024, we have so far recorded over 2,500 safety conversations (up to June 2024). This has allowed STARK to significantly reduce the number of potential workplace accidents.

The team at Flaunt really made the transition of SMAT to STARK Connect a seamless task, with the same easy to use functionality for the user and a look and feel intune with STARK UK branding. The mechanics behind the platform were effortlessly tuned with no impact or disruption to the Branch network.

STARK - Andy Johnson, EHS Quality, Facilities & Services Manager

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