My Blog

Are you a construction worker? Think you know the proper procedures to prevent injuries and fatalities when you are on a site? Even if you think you know basic safety procedures, it’s good to have OSHA training for construction workers to be on the smart side of caution.

OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Since the 1970s, the federal agency has focused on training and safety standards to reduce workplace hazards. Their mission has worked successfully. Over the decades, OSHA has reduced job fatalities by 66 percent.

Construction is one of the most dangerous industries, primarily because of four main hazards:

• Falls
• Caught in / between
• Struck-by
• Electrocution

Falls are the leading cause of death on construction sites. They occur from slick surfaces, improper scaffolding, holes or skylights and roofs with unprotected edges. Improper ladder use, a common problem, results in hundreds of injuries or fatal falls every year. Working during rain and wind, lacking proper training and working alone at high elevations also can cause falls.

A caught-in or between hazard happens when an employee is squeezed, caught, crushed or pinched between one or more objects like heavy machinery. OSHA cites unstable walls or structures at excavation sites, which can collapse and bury workers, as critical risks in the construction industry. Employees often are not properly trained in operating complicated equipment or know safety protocols. As a result, accidents, like a worker getting pinned between a wall and a piece of heavy equipment, happen. They can cause major, and often disabling, injuries or even death.

Many injuries and, yes even, fatalities occur when workers are struck by objects that move, fall, or roll. A worker may get hit by flying objects and unsecured loads. Swinging cranes on a construction site create major risks for workers. Other dangerous examples include unmarked low beams, improper demolition of buildings, and unevenly stacked heavy materials that may slip, slide, and ultimately fall.

Electrical issues, which can cause burns and electrocution, should always be monitored on construction sites. A burn is the most common shock-related injury. Electrocution is usually fatal and occurs when a person receives a lethal amount of electrical energy. For example, two workers are moving an aluminum ladder. One of them is electrocuted when the ladder comes in contact with overhead power lines. Such a simple mistake can have a tragic outcome.

These potentially lethal threats are why it’s critically important that workers, even if they have years of job experience, take OSHA training for construction, which covers these and many other issues.

Working with a Dynamics 365 sales professional and software development design team to create a new customer management project using Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a change process, not a one-time event. The change process can be broken down into steps and then repeated as improvement cycles.

The steps are taken in order and then repeated as the change process continues to improve the Dynamics 365 system with the elimination of problems and the fine-tuning of the successful outcomes.

Managing a Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Project

It is the job of a Dynamics 365 sales professional to understand the change dynamics of all the stakeholders involved and gently guide them through the process. This includes a high level of initial enthusiasm, frustration with implementation problems, and eventual acceptance of the new system with a goal to make continual improvements.

Once these preliminary objectives are achieved, the system becomes a powerful tool to use with artificial intelligence algorithms for data mining to create valuable insights for any organization.

Here are the steps for developing a new Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Project:

1. Project Initiation — Work with all stakeholders, including management and representatives of end-users, to develop a master plan. Manage expectations to avoid unreasonable projections and deal with emotions that include a range of uncertainty and fear to confidence and excitement. Do not profess excessive optimism. At the same time, reduce the influence of any nay-sayers who want to derail the project before it even gets started.
2. Project Requirements — Brainstorm about needs and wants. Make a long wish-list of deliverables. Prioritize the items on the list by their importance to the project’s perceived success. Design a project plan and a timeline.
3. Project Development — Build out the system according to the deliverables determined in step two. At this point, it is common for a process of second-guessing to occur. Initial enthusiasm wears off and confidence declines. In spite of these naturally occurring negative feelings, continue with the project development according to the plan, unless some major unforeseen barrier is encountered that forces an adjustment to the master plan.
4. Testing — During the development process, user-acceptance testing is necessary to run test scripts and find out where items fail to pass performance requirements. Failures are to be expected. Thorough testing should uncover all weaknesses in the project design. Frustration is the highest during this period as all the bugs are worked out of the system in a methodological manner.
5. Training — The training process helps increase end-user confidence with the new customer resource management system. By following basic user-adoption techniques, the users will learn the system and start to use its features in ways that help them to see how the system will be useful in their daily work.
6. Go Live — At this point, a functioning system can go live. Monitor performance of the live system. This is the start of the development-improvement cycle.
7. Repeat — Identify improvements, which can be made in a functioning system. This starts a redundant cycle of evaluating new needs, making a plan to address them, and implementing them by repeating these change-cycle steps.

Summary

Change management is a continual process. The steps listed above represent a one change-management cycle that can be used by a development team repeatedly to improve a Dynamics 365 system.

Small businesses are now emerging, evolving and becoming a global work space.Enterpreneurs are aware that in order to grow, compete and flourish in this fast paced industry you need to have a broad outlook along with the flexibility to adapt with the ever-changingtechnology. Manytraditional businesses are also turning towards technology to achieve desired progress, one of which is a virtual phone system.

Virtual Phone Numbers Enhance the Company’s Communication

Virtual phone numbers are a paramount to a business’s communication department. These numbers have set a standard for effective communication between the firm and the customer. Today, with the use of these numbers, you do not have to worry about being available at all times.

Virtual phone numbers allow the customers and clients to contact a firm that may not even have a physical office. Moreover, you do not require a direct phone line; instead you can receive calls on a landline phone or a mobile phone. Setting up the virtual phone number from service providers such as Mightycall and grasshopper phone service is easy and efficient in every way.

How would any enterprise decide that what kind of virtual phone system do they require and who is the best service provider?

Virtual phone numbers allow users to ascertain if the phone calls are related to business or are personal. This is accomplished by providing users with a second phone number that can be answered with the same device. Whichever provider selected by the user should offer a service that is convenient, affordable, and comes with great customer support, should be chosen by the client.

The assessment of best Virtual phone service provider is done according to the following features:

• Price: Comparing the price and features of each virtual phonenumber provider.
• Ease of use: Each service can be evaluated for how easy its system is set up and used, also maintained.
• Convenience: The service depending on the type of business has to be assessed prior to making decision.
• Call management: The types of call management features each provider offers can be evaluated, including voicemail call screening, call forwarding, and call block capability.
• Multiline management: Multi-line phone systems are designed to permit multiple people to be on the phone at the same time. These multiple lines can be external or internal. External lines let you communicate with your customers, while internal lines enable you to communicate with your employees and colleagues. These lines become a “system” because they need to connect to talk with each other. By assessing how easy it is to separate your business calls from personal calls on a landline or mobile phone.
• Extensions: Options for routing calls via phone number extensions can be noted for each solution.
• Auto-attendant: Evaluating based on whether the provider offers an automated attendant for greeting and routing callers.
• Call quality: Online customer reviews of each virtual number provider’s call sound and quality can be evaluated.
• Customer support:  The type of customer service support each provider offers, including hours of availability, can be assessed.

The selection of virtual service providers may differ according to the requirements of thebusinesses.