Page 120 - Australasian Paint & Panel magazine Nov-Dec 2021

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BEST PRACTICE AWARDS
PAINT&PANEL NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2021 WWW.PAINTANDPANEL.COM.AU
INNOVATION AWARD
MONIT
MONIT IS NOT NEW BUT IT IS INNOVATIVE AND OH&S COMPLIANCE BECOMES MORE VITAL WITH EACH PASSING YEAR.
MONIT makes it easy for business owners to keep stay safe and stay OH&S compliant.
G
ARY WILCOX FOUNDED
MONIT 20 years ago out of necessity. He’s an ex-panel- beater and at the time was running seven panel shops. He started out writing some software for quality assurance– essentially fancy ex- cel documents which went down well and he was asked to do the same for
health and safety.
He knew that OH&S was going to be-
come ‘a big thing’ in the future and so looked around for a product as he didn’t want to get involved in developing soft- ware, but there wasn’t anything at all for the automotive market.
So he built his own and it worked well. A couple of friends who owned panel shops asked if he could sell it to them. Word got around and so MONIT was born. Now, 20 years later it services 350 different types of industries from paediatrics to private islands. MONIT is probably the biggest provider of work- place health and safety into the collision repair industry and general automotive. It’s really aimed at small to medium sized businesses but saying that both AMA and Repairhub use it.
In 2015 Wilcox developed the program as an App. Once you have the App you don’t have to know anything about health and safety. You just have to do what it tells you. There are questions you have to answer about your business so that all the risk tasks can be generat- ed and then you get around five tasks a month. Once they are complete you take a photo and leave a comment. Then the MONIT team looks at the photo to check it’s compliant. If it is you get a big tick, if
it isn’t it stays in the App as a non-com- pliant item.
With each task there is reference ma- terial to help you. For instance if you don’t have an anti-bullying policy then there’s one in the App.
Basically MONIT identifies all of your risk and helps you to eliminate them all. Importantly, over time, it changes the culture of the buisiness. It helps to create a better work environ- ment - there’s fewer sick days and obvi- ously injuries are down.
Around half of the tasks are carried out during toolbox meetings which en- courages business internal communi- cation and makes the team feel con- sulted. It’s also about protecting your
business from legal action – if a worker loses a finger that is an immediate criminal action against the business in most states if you didn’t ensure that they were trained in all aspects of OH&S around using the offending piece of equipment.
Wilcox is passionate about the industry and keeping business owners and their teams protected and is a very worth win- ner for this year’s Innovation award.
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