How Amsted Rail Fully Automated Daily Employee Health Checks to Safely Bring Back Its Workforce

Amsted Rail is on a mission to continue its 100+ year legacy of delivering next-level reliability, performance, and value. To do that, the company staffs more than 10,000 employees across its global manufacturing facilities.

Even so, because Amsted Rail puts lean principles at its operational epicenter, is constantly looking for ways to:

• Boost efficiency
• Reduce waste
• Continuously improve workplace performance

Learn how Amsted Rail reached 96% Beekeeper adoption.

Amsted Rail decided to partner with Beekeeper in 2019  to create a mobile collaboration platform that reaches, connects, and engages employees wherever they are. When the global pandemic turned the world on its head – a year later, Amsted Rail was ready to adapt.

Let’s take a look at three ways Amsted Rail optimized essential internal processes – both before and during 2020 – using Beekeeper’s mobile platform.

1) Keeping Employees Informed With Instant Access To Company News

Amsted Rail is a globally integrated manufacturer responsible for keeping the world moving by enabling railroads to haul heavier loads over greater distances. As such, an effective internal communication strategy is essential to ensuring employees can deliver on company objectives.

In 2019, Amsted Rail knew its internal strategy was out of alignment with its lean business objectives.

“A lean organization is always looking for ways to eliminate waste. When applying that principle, we realized we had a lot of opportunities to eliminate waste not just within our own systems from a technology standpoint, but from what our people were doing and how they were receiving information.”

– Ryan Smith, Workplace Solutions Manager, Amsted Rail

With Beekeeper, Amsted Rail established an easy-to-access centralized location for important information. The company created a Stream called “Shop Talk,” where the team distributed exclusive content team members could only access through Beekeeper.

Today, the company supports an effective internal communication strategy that prioritizes:

• Keeping employees informed with the latest company news and information
• Equipping team members with instant access to important documents and materials when and where they need it
• Enabling staff to perform as efficiently as possible

2) Eliminating Paper-Based HR Processes

The Beekeeper app quickly and efficiently improved Amsted Rail’s internal HR processes. This was another crucial benefit. 

Before Beekeeper, for instance, the company posted job openings on a bulletin board. Interested employees wrote their names down. Managers manually tracked the process on the backend using various time-consuming spreadsheets.

With Beekeeper’s Forms capabilities, employees now can easily fill out their information from their mobile devices. HR managers no longer have to keep up with clunky, outdated processes along the way and instead have instant access to the employee data they need. This saves critical time, energy, and capacity.

“Because of Beekeeper’s Forms technology, we can just download the form, and it parses directly into an Excel sheet for us. All that data that we were manually putting in, we’re now able to get that immediately without having any of the administrative waste in there.”

3) Saving Time With Digital Employee Screening During COVID-19

With Beekeeper in place, Amsted Rail was better equipped to deal with the evolving, (albeit uncertain) COVID-19 work environment. Even so, the company needed to adapt quickly to changing health and safety guidelines in order to safely bring back its workers.

When the company first began bringing back employees to work on-site, Amsted Rail implemented an employee health screening process to allow COVID-negative team members back to work. But manually screening every employee each morning was time-consuming and tedious. It often took their security guards over two hours each morning to screen their workers.

Using Beekeeper, Amsted Rail integrated its security software to pre-screen employees before they showed up for work. The app’s digital survey included questions that, based on their answers, indicated if the employee did or did not pass the screening process. If they did pass the survey, the information was fed directly to the integrated program. Then, the employee seamlessly accessed their facility.

Beekeeper streamlined the screening process and enabled security teams to spend more time on other tasks.  Employees no longer had to wait in line before getting to work — another huge plus.

Today, many of Amsted Rail’s employees are using the Beekeeper app. Why? The integrated screening process was a huge contributor to effectively engaging team members during this challenging time. 

“We’re going to continue down this path of continually pushing new things out to our employees inside of Beekeeper, including adding to our document library. Our goal is to make Beekeeper the one-stop-shop for information."

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