“Businesses that can demonstrate that they take their risk management issues seriously with Safeguard can expect big returns.”
About Busy Bees
Busy Bees is the UK’s largest provider of children’s day nurseries.
- Founded in 1983
- UK’s longest established national provider of quality childcare and education
- Number of locations: 130
Project Summary
Busy Bees had a business need for a robust system to provide a more standardised way of controlling and managing accidents, incidents, events and audits across their 130 unique locations. Their existing system had become burdensome and costly to administer and wasn’t easy to extract management information from for trend analysis and compliance.
Busy Bees is the UK’s largest and longest established national provider of children’s day nurseries, offering more than 11,500 nursery places to children in over 130 unique locations nationwide. A rapidly growing group, sites include company-owned locations, sites for corporate clients including Tesco, Land Rover, Universities and Hospitals, and operations in shopping centres and sports and leisure businesses. Busy Bees also offers The Hive, before and after-school and holiday care for school aged children. Busy Bees acquired Leapfrog Day Nurseries (33 sites) from Nord Anglia Education in 2008 and another 9 sites from TLC Nursery Group in September 2009.
Business Needs
When Busy Bees took over 88 Leapfrog Nurseries it became one of the UK largest childcare chains, and a high profile business. Business risk management remains of the utmost importance, and it was important to maintain a strong safety message during the organisation’s rapid growth. Safety and security are business priorities and the premises, procedures and policies are all designed to ensure peace of mind for parents.
Busy Bees had identified that its methods of capturing and managing Incidents and Events was comprehensive but inefficient, and knew of Rivo’s work with Nord Anglia Education. There was also a need for a centralised Audit management system to ensure continuity of best practice across all sites. Busy Bees engaged Rivo Software to perform an initial business process analysis; a rapid and measurable return on investment was identified and Rivo’s Safeguard solution was chosen to best meet their business needs.
It was crucial that the chosen solution was scalable with the business’s rapid expansion, mouldable around the corporate identity, and flexible enough to fit an industry specific set of requirements. Rivo’s consultation process identified that it was business critical to demonstrate procedures to regulatory bodies, including Ofsted, Environmental Health, HSE, CSCI, LSC and host organisations and Busy Bees must be able to evidence their procedures quickly and easily.
It was important for the chosen system to be flexible enough to be tailored to Busy Bees group’s specific requirements, including functionality for staff to log, notify, and spot trends relating to accidents, incidents, near-misses, communicable diseases such as Norovirus and Swine ‘Flu, Environmental Health issues and inappropriate behaviours. There was also a business need for a robust system to control and manage Audits across multiple locations, as the organisation grew to move towards a centralised and auditable process.
Solution
As part of Busy Bees’ Audit module, Environmental Health inspections, quarterly Fire checks, and Health & Safety Audits are scheduled centrally on a nursery by nursery basis. This means that if an Audit isn’t completed, there is an immediate indication to the area manager that there may be a compliance issue. Reports are automatically pushed out to the right people at the right time, and all terminology is tailored to Busy Bees to ensure maximum user uptake.
Safeguard automatically holds a detailed audit trail, and Busy Bees are confident that when they are audited by a regulatory authority, or want to demonstrate to their world-class procedures to their next corporate client, they can demonstrate the Safeguard system with confidence.
Busy Bees can now immediately identify trends relating to real-time data, and make key management decisions and manage funding appropriately. Staff can now capture any event quickly, and an automatic notification is sent to the appropriate manager immediately. Trend reports are run to capture up-to-the minute information from any location and Senior Managers and Board members now have access to real time status of compliance across the entire organisation
Return on Investment
The implementation of Safeguard has had a dramatic impact and delivered a measurable return on investment for Busy Bees. Events can be managed more proactively as better business information is immediately available. When tendering for new nurseries, Safeguard is used to demonstrate best practice to differentiate Busy Bees from the competition, in a sector where risk management is paramount.
The Learning & Skills Council and ROSPA have given Busy Bees glowing reports on their use of the system at recent routine Audits, and there are a number of unexpected benefits found, as John Shattock, Health & Safety Manager describes:
“we can now spot regional trends relating to chicken pox, Norovirus, or swine ‘flu after a few instances, and warn other nurseries so they can be fully prepared”.
Marg Dunn, National Safety Advisor, describes how Safeguard has “dramatically reduced the time taken to run trend reports. It used to take many man days to sort through spreadsheets to capture trends and results.” Regional Directors now run these reports themselves, which means they can now chase and manage their area’s Monitoring activity.
Safeguard has quickly proved to be a sound corporate investment with continued measurable return for the Busy Bees group. Risk can be managed proactively, the solution is scalable as the business evolves, and the system’s flexibility enables Rivo to tailor a system that exactly meets the client’s unique needs.
This white paper details the measurable financial benefits delivered to Rivo’s clients through the implementation of Safeguard.
