When you need a technician, your first thought is a ‘fundi’ of sorts, informal but competent and professional enough to solve your problem.
But a lot more goes into offering professional services and maintaining the highest standards of health and safety for technical staff.
Case in point: fibre optic technicians that play a crucial role in the installation and maintenance of networks. This responsibility requires a high level of health and safety and must follow certain protocols every day to reduce the risk of accidents and injuries.
Before they even arrive on site, for example, they must fill out a journey management form for the vehicle they will travel in to ensure it is in good condition and that all its parts are working properly.
Again, before work begins, they must also fill out a permit-to-work form that ensures they are qualified for the job and when and where they will be working.
In the early days of rolling out fibre optic connections, these processes were conducted manually and had to be undertaken daily. Now, they have been replaced and digitised by an app called Uzima.
Daniel Mwaura, a supervisor at TechMinds, a technology services company, has been around since the early days.
“Initially, we used to do it manually, that is, writing on paper. And we would misplace the papers,” he recalls. “Nowadays, it’s efficient because, with just a tap on your phone, you’re able to fill in the permits and the journey management plans. You can record observations that you see on site, like hazards.”
Uzima, which was created through a joint effort by Safaricom’s DIT, Cybersecurity, and Network teams, went live in 2023. It was built to digitise manual processes and enhance health and safety management for Safaricom staff and its subcontractors.
The app is one way the company is using technology to create a safer, more efficient, and productive work environment.
“Everyone has a risk profile in Uzima. What that means is my profile, and probably a technician’s profile, or someone who works at heights have different profiles depending on the work that we do. So, on Uzima, the first step is you upload your certification. Whether you are a rigger who works at height or whether you are a fleet driver, you upload your certification, and the app basically categorises your risk profile: either you are high risk, medium risk, or low risk,” Peter Kahenya from Governance & Assurance, Process & Operations Excellence explains.
He continues, “Once you update your profile, you can report safety observations that you find on site. So, whether it’s here at the office or someone has spilled something, we are able to quickly log in with your Safaricom credentials, report the observation, and that observation immediately goes to the engineer in charge of the site.”
Health and safety is moving from a paper-based system to a digital way of working to improve processes and efficiency and, most importantly, protect people.
Watch the story to learn more about the Uzima app.
