When Parallel Compliance Starts Swamping Health and Safety

New Zealand’s construction and infrastructure sector has invested heavily in stronger safety systems over the past decade.

Prequalification, formalised risk assessments, verified competencies, and documented plant inspections are now standard practice.

These improvements matter. They have lifted expectations across the industry.

However, a structural issue is emerging.

For contractors operating across hundreds of sites, parallel compliance systems are beginning to swamp health and safety capacity.

The Reality of Operating Across Hundreds of Customer Sites

McLeod works across hundreds of construction and infrastructure sites each year. Each principal contractor or asset owner typically operates or subscribes to its own safety and compliance portal.

Common platforms include HammerTech, CheckRight, Rapid, Staylive (SCT), and other bespoke systems. In many cases, even projects using the same software operate under separate tenants, each with its own logins and datasets.

Seperate Tenants - means the same software is treated like many software packages with each user/company isolated from the other.

Each system generally requires the same core information:

• Plant risk assessments

• Service histories and inspection records

• Operator and dogman certifications

• First aid and training records

• Registration numbers and expiry dates

• Supporting documentation and images

All of this information already exists within controlled internal systems at McLeod to meet our own legal obligations and WorkSafe expectations.

The duplication arises when identical datasets must be manually be rebuilt inside multiple external systems, often dozens of times per year, often in slightly different formats.

Duplication at Scale

Our internal systems are structured to ensure:

• Plant is registered, inspected, and maintained

• Operators are competent and appropriately certified

• Training records are current and monitored

• Risk assessments are documented and reviewed

These systems are audited and actively managed.

When the same information must then be re-entered across multiple portals, the administrative effort expands without changing the underlying controls.

For a crane that may operate on site for only a few hours, the required portal administration can consume days of work across HSE, maintenance, and operations teams.

The issue is not compliance. It is parallel compliance.

The Capacity Trade-Off

Health and safety capability is finite.

When experienced professionals spend increasing amounts of time:

• Re-keying expiry dates

• Uploading identical certificates across different systems

• Managing multiple platform logins (in some cases multiple user IDs [email addresses]) for the same platform.

• Responding to automated document requests

that time is drawn away from higher-impact activities, including:

• Reviewing lift plans for complex or non-routine lifts

• Auditing operators and work fronts

• Confirming exclusion zones and site interfaces

• Conducting site-based engagement and observation

• Building company safety culture

Administrative expansion without coordination creates a trade-off. The more effort directed toward repeated data entry, the less capacity remains for field-based risk management.

A Structural Industry Challenge

Software is now easier and faster to deploy than ever before. Traditional SaaS platforms are widely available, and with AI-assisted development, tailored compliance tools can be created rapidly and at relatively low cost.

Each project team can introduce its own system to improve oversight.

Individually, these decisions are rational.

Collectively, they are fragmenting the compliance landscape.

For contractors working across many clients and hundreds of sites, the cumulative effect includes:

• Repeated manual data entry of identical information

• Separate datasets within similar or identical platforms

• Increased administrative overhead per project

• Greater potential for clerical inconsistencies through re-keying

• Growing pressure on HSE and compliance teams

When every project introduces its own portal, even if the requested data is largely the same, contractors are required to maintain multiple parallel compliance environments.

The accelerating ease of software creation means this trend is likely to continue. Without industry alignment on shared standards or data structures, duplication will scale with digital capability.

Compliance Must Support Operational Control

Compliance portals serve a legitimate purpose. They provide visibility and assurance to principal contractors that minimum standards are met before work begins.

However, documentation confirms that records exist. It does not replace:

• Competent decision-making on site

• Engineering review of lifts

• Effective supervision

• Active hazard identification and control

Safety performance in crane and heavy plant operations is delivered through planning, verification, and execution in the field.

Compliance systems should reinforce these controls.

When parallel systems multiply without coordination, they can begin to compete with the operational work they are intended to support.

A More Coordinated Path Forward

There is an opportunity to align industry standards while reducing duplication.

1. Standardised Compliance Data Structures

Agreement across major contractors on a common structure for plant and personnel compliance data would allow information to be demonstrated once and shared securely across projects.

2. Recognition of Robust Internal Systems

Where contractors can demonstrate audited and controlled internal compliance systems, repeated reconstruction of identical datasets across multiple portals may not be necessary.

3. Structured Compliance Sharing

Secure digital compliance packs, controlled access to live registers, or recognised prequalification models could reduce or eliminate duplication while maintaining transparency.

4. Protecting HSE Capacity

Administrative systems should enable health and safety professionals to focus on:

• Engineering review

• Lift planning reviews

• Operator assessments

• Exclusion zone training

• Supervisor engagement

These activities directly reduce risk.

The Safety Conversation

McLeod remains fully committed to:

• Strong legal compliance

• Transparent engagement with principal contractors

• Continuous improvement in safety performance

We are also seeing firsthand how parallel compliance across hundreds of sites is placing significant pressure on health and safety capacity.

This is not a call to reduce oversight. It is a call for large businesses to ensure oversight is proportionate, coordinated, and effective.

If administrative duplication begins to swamp service providers responsible for managing operational risk, the industry should pause and reassess how compliance is demonstrated and shared.

Safety performance is delivered on-site. Our compliance systems should be structured to reinforce that outcome. ~ Scott McLeod