Our experience with Health & Safety…
Our experience with Health & Safety Institute (HSI) has been extremely frustrating, particularly with both the Learning Management System (LMS) and Safety Management System (SMS). The biggest issue has been the lack of meaningful customer and technical support for their SMS platform. There is no practical direct phone-support capability, no option to schedule a Teams meeting with a knowledgeable technical specialist, and no consistent way to work directly with an individual who actually understands the platforms well enough to troubleshoot problems in real time. Our company has had three different HSI liaisons. Unfortunately, none of them demonstrated sufficient working knowledge of the LMS or SMS to effectively diagnose or correct the issues we encountered. Most of the support we received consisted of searching HSI's video library and sending us links to instructional videos. In several instances, even the video links provided to us did not work. That is not an effective substitute for knowledgeable technical support, particularly when an organization is trying to implement and manage enterprise-level EHS systems. System reliability and communication have also been concerns. Both platforms will occasionally experience outages or become unavailable, yet we have not consistently received advance notification, outage alerts, or timely communication explaining that a system problem is occurring. As a result, users may initially spend time troubleshooting what appears to be an internal problem before determining that the HSI platform itself is unavailable. For systems being relied upon for safety training, incident reporting, inspections, corrective actions, and other EHS functions, timely service-status communication should be a basic expectation. Another significant concern has been platform changes. Capabilities, processes, or system functionality have changed without adequate notification to customers. When we later questioned why something no longer worked the way it previously had, the response was sometimes essentially that the platform had always operated that way, with little recognition of the previous process or functionality. This creates unnecessary confusion and makes it very difficult to establish consistent internal procedures around the systems. We also experienced considerable frustration during implementation when limitations in system functionality were not clearly identified early in the process. Requirements that had been discussed for months eventually proved difficult or impossible to configure as expected, resulting in additional effort, delays, rework, and expense. Both the LMS and SMS have useful capabilities, and HSI may be adequate as a short-term bridge for an organization that needs to establish basic EHS infrastructure quickly. However, based on our experience, I would not recommend HSI as a permanent enterprise solution for an organization that needs a robust, scalable EHS management system with strong technical support and responsive account management. Ultimately, far too much time and energy has been spent trying to obtain answers, troubleshoot platform issues, work around system limitations, and determine why functionality has changed. An EHS management system should reduce administrative burden and make the safety program easier to manage. Too often, our experience with HSI has produced the opposite result.
By Ron H.