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Africa|Business|Contractor|Engineering|Health|Innovation|Mining|Resources|Risk Management|Safety|System|transport|Equipment
Africa|Business|Contractor|Engineering|Health|Innovation|Mining|Resources|Risk Management|Safety|System|transport|Equipment
africa|business|contractor|engineering|health|innovation|mining|resources|risk-management|safety|system|transport|equipment

Local female engineers taking their cloud-based health and safety compliance solution global 

29th August 2022

     

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This article has been supplied as a media statement and is not written by Creamer Media. It may be available only for a limited time on this website.

Ingrid Osborne and Julie Mathieson are the co-founders of HSEC Online®, a digitized cloud-based health and safety compliance solution that has completely changed how corporates and contractors integrate and manage their business compliance challenges in South Africa. Now, these innovative businesswomen are primed to take their solution global.  

Business compliance is critical for large companies, especially in heavy industry such as mining and forestry where contractors work on-site and often with large and potentially dangerous equipment. Compliance can affect a business’s license to operate and helps prevent costly incidents, yet up until recently, it was the bane of the existence of site managers who had to cart around a physical ‘safety file’ while on-site.  This was normally a lever arch file which contained the necessary documents that would need to be hauled out when required, usually when an accident or contravention had taken place.  The process was clumsy, very time-consuming and costly. 

Osborne and Mathieson, who head up the KZN-based Saryx Engineering Group, 100% owners of HSEC Online®, epitomize the high-growth entrepreneur who transforms economies.  HSEC Online has converted South Africa’s outdated, manually driven contractor compliance system, and replaced it with a transparent, collaborative workflow platform that eliminates the manual complexities of health and safety document & contractor management, and any management compliance. 

“HSEC Online® is the ideal solution to solve business compliance challenges” says Mathieson, a computer scientist who is Chief Technical Officer for HSEC Online®. “We’ve made it as user-friendly and smart as possible, because we are trying to eliminate human error here.  The platform is also flexible enough to help any company or contractor manage and control everything from legal issues to Personal Protective Equipment management, not to mention audits, risk management and of course all the required documentation around emergency procedures and organisational safety policies, in a safe and secure manner.”

“The amount of money that businesses pay in terms of fines for non-compliance is massive, and if we can reduce that, and make sure that everyone goes home safely at the end of every single day - well, that’s the ultimate goal,” adds Osborne.  

HSEC is not built for a country or a certain type of industry, it is a complete platform that allows almost any business to put a solid framework in place and to implement HSEC Online® themselves - to manage their own compliance needs with all their contractors. Moreover, the team proudly serves both medium size companies as well as the largest multi-nationals in the transport and mining industries. It makes sense then that these enterprising women are currently actively seeking a strategic partner to enable the business to expand and scale on a global level. 

“We sold our first HSEC Online® enterprise license in 2017/2018, and since then we’ve grown our team to 40 FTEs and now serve over 122,864 customers  in 14 countries.  We are opening an office in the US later this year and will be raising capital to support our global growth. We are doing this with the support of Endeavor, the leading global community of High-Growth Entrepreneurs, that equips entrepreneurs with the resources needed to scale their businesses. We have been part of Endeavor since 2018 when we won the FNB Business Innovation Awards, and this is when Julie and I became Endeavor Entrepreneurs,” says Osborne.  “This association has been life-changing in terms of the direction we’ve taken our business, so when we decided to take this step – to seek a strategic partner to help us to raise capital to scale internationally – we turned to Endeavor for guidance,” she adds.

Alison Collier, Endeavor South Africa’s MD says, “We believe that High-Growth Entrepreneurs transform economies and Ingrid & Julie have demonstrated this empirically, with the creation of HSEC Online®. Our mission is to support talented entrepreneurs just like these phenomenal women, by leveraging our vast global network (Endeavor is present in 40 markets globally, with 500 staff, 4,000 entrepreneurs and 5,000 mentors) to broker direct investment as well as mentoring them to grow their businesses - thereby accelerating their growth in a way that is best suited for them.  We are delighted to be able to guide them as they expand internationally.”

“Entrepreneurs' greatest asset is their contrarian way of thinking, their tendency to zig when others zag, to go in a new direction. But many people don't give themselves permission to get going for fear that they will be called crazy. I say not only is crazy a compliment, but if you're not called crazy when you start something new, then you're not thinking big enough!” says Linda Rottenberg, co-founder and CEO of Endeavor. 

South Africans are not short on ideas, or the determination and commitment in bringing them to fruition.  The women behind HSEC Online® bring to mind famed American songwriting duo McFadden and Whitehead’s signature tune ‘Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now’.

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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