SafetyCulture’s iAuditor is a Hosted Inspection App that Makes it Easier for Users to Facilitate Safe, Data-Driven Workplaces

TL; DR: SafetyCulture strives to facilitate safer working environments via iAuditor, a hosted inspection app launched in 2012. Businesses in more than 80 countries now leverage the mobile safety solution over 50,000 times a day to build checklists, conduct inspections, and file reports, among other use cases. The SafetyCulture team, which spans the U.S., England, Philippines, and Australia, has issued COVID-19 response resources and currently working on feature updates intended to enhance workplace safety.

Compliance is often seen as the gold standard to which leaders should aspire, but is it, really? Consider what the term means through the lens of parenting: providing food, clothing, shelter, and access to medical care.

These are obligations — acceptable conditions as required by law — but we all know children need and deserve a lot more. Emotional support, love, structure, and consistency are the building blocks of healthy child development.

“It’s something our CEO says all the time,” said Nick Topping, Manager of Marketing & Business Development, Americas, at SafetyCulture. “When you think of compliance in terms of the relationship between a parent and child, it’s the bare minimum.”

With that understanding, SafetyCulture aims to help businesses go above and beyond workplace safety regulations with iAuditor. The hosted mobile and web app allows users to ensure they comply with the law while also providing visibility and insights into raising safety standards across the organization.

iAuditor’s intuitive checklist software makes it easy for users in more than 80 countries to collect data, standardize operations, identify areas for improvement, resolve problems, and send reports. SafetyCulture estimates that cumulatively, the iAuditor user base turns to the mobile safety app more than 50,000 times per day, whether they’re building checklists, conducting inspections, or filing reports.

Now, as many leaders struggle to get back to business in the face of COVID-19, SafetyCulture is also offering safety checklists centered on business continuity, working from home, stopping the spread of the virus, and reopening offices.

Founder Luke Anear started SafetyCulture in 2004 after spending years witnessing real workplace accidents as a private investigator.

“He investigated workplace accidents and incidents after they occurred to make sure people who claimed to be injured at work were really hurt,” Nick told us. “He started seeing the impact these events had on people’s everyday lives, and thought, ‘I’m on the wrong side of this — what can I do to help prevent workplace injuries?’”

While working from his garage in Townsville, Australia, Luke decided to approach the task via checklists and documents designed to improve processes, reduce errors, and increase safety. With that, SafetyCulture was born.

But it wasn’t until 2007, when mobile devices and apps hosted on web servers became a part of our everyday lives, that Luke realized he should make the move from safety documents to an app. In 2012, after years of development, the first version of iAuditor was released, advancing safety inspections across the globe.

“The company was founded to make workers’ lives easier and safer — ensuring they can go home to their families at the end of the day,” Nick said.

In 2014, SafetyCulture raised $1.6 million in Australian dollars during its first funding round via investments from Atlassian Co-Founder Scott Farquhar and Blackbird Ventures. In the years following, the company experienced so much growth that it opened additional offices in Sydney, Kansas City, and Manchester.

Since its inception, the company has evolved the product to serve a wide range of customer needs. “iAuditor is completely industry-agnostic and customizable,” Nick said. “Obviously, it’s big in the construction, manufacturing, and aviation sectors, but we’re also seeing it used in retail and hospitality to ensure cleanliness, sanitization, and proper food prep.”

To help those in healthcare, emergency, and education sectors navigate workplace safety amid the coronavirus pandemic, SafetyCulture is offering six months of free access to iAuditor for essential services teams, K-12 schools and higher education institutions for the upcoming academic year. The goal is to help those in essential industries get safely back to learning.

In addition, the company is hosting free reopening checklists on its site tailored to laws and recommendations in the U.S., UK, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Other resources include guides designed to help users implement government advice on safely returning to work; reopening stores, bars, and restaurants; implementing social distancing measures; and managing warehouses, depots, and even berry farms.

“I think our products are positioned pretty well to help mitigate risk, streamline business continuity, and adhere to CDC guidelines, among other regulations,” Nick said. “We’re in a good spot to help people by including this type of information.”

In addition to customer feedback and general regulatory trends, COVID-19 is a driving factor in iAuditor’s product development road map. Nick told us that the team has reprioritized features that help customers in this uncertain time.

“A lot of companies want to move toward proactive checks rather than reactive checks now, especially due to COVID-19,” he said. “So, instead of checking a piece of equipment once a month, we’re going to enable the frontline users in the field to check it every day. You’re getting more data, more checks to ensure things are working correctly.”

When it comes to pricing, small teams are in luck: SafetyCulture provides free access to iAuditor for up to 10 team members. The plan includes eight inspections per month, 12 reports per month, and standard support.

“It’s super easy to get started with the free model, which has many of the same aspects as a premium license,” Nick said. “Once they conduct a few inspections, audits, and checks, people start seeing how iAuditor puts the data front and center. They can quickly identify trends, such as where they are doing well and not so well, and invest in making improvements.”

For teams that need to host more than 10 users, the Premium plan is a good bet, featuring everything in the free plan plus unlimited inspections, the ability to define user roles and permissions, and on-demand analytics.

Businesses with complex user management needs that require dedicated account management and enhanced support response time often turn to SafetyCulture’s iAuditor Enterprise plan. All paid packages are free for 30 days with no upfront commitment.

Nick told us that the platform’s mobile-friendly design makes it a breeze for users on all three plans to get started, while powerful inspection management helps save money and time. Depending on the industry, the benefits can vary, but for most people, iAuditor helps users affordably and conveniently mitigate risk, thus improving the safety of their employees.

“iAuditor helps us confine the data so we can identify the best approach to take,” said Mardee Billingsly, VP at Tremco WTI Global Operations. “You can pull the data and say ‘OK, we have an issue we’ve identified. How do we help?’ We are now able to credit our volume of quality inspections with a decrease in incidents and injuries — we all win.”

This year, SafetyCulture’s $1.3 billion valuation earned it a coveted spot in Australia’s unicorn club. The company is celebrating that status with an all-new feature for capturing incidents and observations, as well as all-in-one iAuditor Sensors.

“We just released temperature and humidity sensors that can be attached to devices and feedback into iAuditor,” Nick said. “For example, in a grocery chain, they could be used to detect whether a refrigerator is malfunctioning and notify you, so you don’t lose a lot of inventory.”

Customers also use iAuditor to quickly address and fix problems that come up in inspections with actions or incident reporting. Customers are quickly able to log issues as they arise, assign someone to take action on the issues, and have their team follow through on them, from identification through completion.

The company is also developing a mobile training feature that allows employees to gain new skills without entering a physical classroom.

“You can learn how to operate devices with just a short video on your phone,” Nick told us. “Employers can even have users take a quiz at the end to ensure they have absorbed the information. And, because it’s within the iAuditor platform, everything is trackable.”

SafetyCulture ‘s goal is to help businesses around the world achieve safer and higher-quality workplaces through easy to use technology. With COVID-19 among us, every location has become high risk — but SafetyCulture’s checklists can help keep workers safe. These easy to use tools can help companies make safety their edge.