Principal contractors
CDM compliance software for principal contractors.
You are answerable for everybody on the site, including the people you did not employ and did not brief.
14 days free access · no card needed
The principal contractor carries the duties that other people's work creates. Planning, managing and monitoring the construction phase means being answerable for subcontractors you engaged, their operatives you never met, and the interaction between trades nobody individually owns.
The evidence problem follows from that. The records you need are generated by other businesses — their risk assessments, their insurance, their operatives' cards — and they arrive by email, in a van, or not at all. Assembling them into something that shows you managed the site is most of the job.
It is also the role with the most exposure after something goes wrong. An investigation asks what you knew, what you checked and what you did about it, and the answer has to be dated.
The records
What principal contractors are answerable for
- Construction phase plan, and the revisions to it
- Subcontractor RAMS, reviewed and accepted
- Subcontractor insurance and accreditation, with expiry
- Site inductions, and who has had one
- Toolbox talks and briefings delivered
- Incidents and near misses, through to close-out
BuildOptix holds each of these against the site, the business or the person it belongs to, with its own expiry.
The problem
What makes principal contractors compliance hard
Answerable for other people's paperwork
The duties attach to you, but the documents are produced by subcontractors with their own systems and their own standards. Chasing, reviewing and accepting them is continuous work that produces nothing visible until the day it is examined.
A plan that stops matching the site
The construction phase plan is a live document, and the site changes weekly. A plan written at mobilisation and never revised is worse than useless at an investigation: it demonstrates that planning stopped.
Who is on site today
Inductions, cards and competence evidence have to hold for everybody present, including operatives who turned up this morning for a subcontractor you engaged last month. The register is only true if it is maintained daily.
Near misses that never reach you
The reports that matter most are the ones where nothing happened, and they are the ones least likely to be written down. Where reporting is awkward, the pattern that would have shown a problem never forms.
Several sites, one duty
Running more than one project means the same obligations repeated in parallel, with evidence held per site by whoever is running it. Nobody sees the organisation's actual position.
The answer
How BuildOptix helps
Answerable for other people's paperwork
Subcontractors sit on a register with their insurance and accreditation expiry tracked, so engaging somebody whose cover has lapsed is visible before they start rather than after an incident.
Subcontractor managementA plan that stops matching the site
Documents are held with their versions against the site they belong to, so the plan in force is the one on the record rather than the one in somebody's inbox.
Document controlWho is on site today
Inductions and briefings are recorded against the person and the site, so who has been inducted — and when — is a register rather than a recollection.
Inductions & toolbox talksNear misses that never reach you
Incidents and near misses are captured from first report through to close-out, which is what turns an event somebody mentioned into a record with an action against it.
Accidents & RIDDORSeveral sites, one duty
Reporting runs across every site at once, so the organisation's position is a view rather than something assembled from each project manager in turn.
HSE reporting
Who it is for
The people doing this job
Site managers
Running the site day to day and holding most of the evidence in their head.
principal contractorSHEQ managers
Answerable for the system across sites, and the person an inspector asks for.
CDM 2015Contracts managers
Engaging subcontractors and carrying what their paperwork does or does not show.
RAMSProject managers
Holding the construction phase plan and the changes that should have revised it.
construction phase planOperatives and supervisors
Receiving the inductions and briefings that the record has to prove happened.
site induction
Questions
What principal contractors ask
- Does BuildOptix handle programme or Gantt charts?
- No. It is not programme, design or BIM software, and it does not plan the build. It holds the health and safety records around it — the plan as a controlled document, the subcontractor evidence, the inductions and the incidents.
- Does it do cost, procurement or invoicing?
- No. There is no estimating, procurement, invoicing or accounting in it. It sits alongside whatever you use commercially.
- Can subcontractors upload their own RAMS?
- Access is role-based, so people outside your own business can be given the part of a site they need. That puts their evidence in your system rather than in an email thread, which is where it usually is when somebody asks for it.
- Does it notify HSE or submit an F10?
- No. It does not submit anything to HSE. Notification and any statutory reporting remain yours; what it holds is the record that supports them.
- Can we see every site at once?
- Yes. Cross-site reporting is one of the things it is built for — the point being to see the position across every project rather than per site on request.
Keep reading
One record per site, and the evidence already in it
Sites, subcontractors, inductions and incidents on one record, for principal contractors desks.
14 days free access · no card needed