With more than 400 iconic sites across the UK, English Heritage linked with Prime Systems to manage its day-to-day risk management.

 

With a wide range of different properties ranging from old ruins to palaces, stately homes and national icons like Stonehenge, Prime were tasked with developing an online system specifically tailored to meet the complex and varied requirements needed by a complex organisation like English Heritage.

 

All sites are open to the public, some are available to hire or rent and many organise events throughout the year. Risk Management criteria vary for each site from daily inspections to twice yearly visits, further complicated by the widespread nature of the organisation.

 

English Heritage handles around two dozen claims a year; with, on average, five active at any one time.  Prime designed a system to make preparing the necessary documentation to defend English Heritage a straightforward operation, even automatically creating the documentation itself.  The time and legal costs saved in effectively defending ‘spurious’ claims and managing the claims process efficiently means the system will pay for itself relatively quickly. 

 

According to Simon Houghton, National Health and Safety Advisor, English Heritage: “The challenges for us are the recording of the procedures that have been carried out, the ability to report accidents and incidents immediately to territorial managers and easy access to guidance and advice for staff who are based on sites all over the country.”

 

Finding the right system was initially difficult, says Houghton: “We began looking at property management systems but they did not provide the structure we needed.  With Prime we quickly realised the benefit of working with a system written by Health and Safety people who really understood our needs. The other great thing about Prime was that everything we asked them to do for us – they said ‘no problem’ and made it happen.” 

 

The end result is a one-stop shop where English Heritage managers can look up information, record actions and report accidents.  Ease of use is combined with the system being handled on Prime’s own secure servers, removing the need for English Heritage to store data or backups.