Obbi integrates compliance, safety and quality in one easy to use platform, saving time, money and mitigating risk. We speak to CEO Gareth Macklin…
What is Obbi Golf?
An awarding winning integrated compliance, safety and training platform. It basically makes club manager’s lives an awful lot easier and helps them sleep comfortably in their beds at night!
We’re operators ourselves and were trying to find a platform to integrate lots of the things that are out there. Everything around people – from on-boarding of staff, HR, training and communication.
For processes there is everything from quality checks, machine checks, weekly fire checks, audits. Plus, from a safety perspective, it covers risk assessments, accident reporting, insurance documentation. We identified that there are lots of individual solutions out there – from Excel, pen and paper and individual apps – but we wanted to make things far easier and bring it all together.
So this is a one-stop shop for anything that would come across a golf club manager’s desk?
Compliance, safety and training are the three things we take together. The reason we’re called Obbi is that we put the obligation onto every single member of staff – whether it’s a greenkeeper who has been working with you for 20 years as a senior manager, or a junior member of the food and beverage team, or even part of an outsourced food and beverage team – every single user has their own individual Obbi passport so what happens is the system reports the information to the right member of staff, at the right time, of the obligations they have to fulfil – hence the name.
So if I’m a greenkeeper for example, doing checks on machines, I can scan a machine’s QR code and it will tell me, here’s the previous check for this machine, if it is working, if it’s not working, what needs doing. And we can make that completely personalised to the club.
But then if, for example, I’m not competent on that machine, if I haven’t been trained, it reports back to me and says you’re not safe to use that machine. It’s that type of personal system for every member of staff.
So that personalised approach works across all departments – golf club manager, food and beverage manager, finance manager, greenkeeper, bar staff…everyone has their own way of integrating?
It’s a waterfall effect. If you’re a club with 12 staff and an outsourced F&B, or if you’re a club with 150 staff and multiple different sections, we can go as many levels deep in terms of the staff you have, or as many levels wide.
We can have a team member in six different teams or in one team, that’s the big thing, it’s a completely personalised set up – what communications do you want, to what members of staff, at what time? And if it doesn’t happen, who is it reported to?
It’s also about helping clubs to meet their minimum legal requirements, integrating all the paperwork into one place?
We built this in conjunction with the Health and Safety Executive and some of the biggest insurers in the world – they’re part of this platform. It’s all about driving safety, keeping people safe in golf clubs.
But we then found the process was one of three things; either golf clubs will bring their insurers in at the start of the year and they would do an audit. Number two they’d bring in one of the big multi-national consultancy firms who do the same sort of stuff. Both of them are brilliant, but all they do is give you a point in time of where you’re at.
The problem for the club managers is that for the remaining 364 days they have to keep getting all the weekly orders filled in, the multi-checks filled in and updated, training updated – and in many cases they don’t have the resources to do that so they can never say right now, on any given day, if they are compliant in all aspects of the club.
They’re under filing cabinets even if they have records whereas if you open the application up tomorrow morning you can see in less than 5 seconds which areas of the club are compliant or not.
Then there’s the third aspect of not doing any of these checks at all. I was speaking recently to a club manager about weekly fire checks and how you can record them, and he said ‘oh, we don’t do weekly fire checks, we only do them every couple of months’. So there is a lack of knowledge about the legal requirements.
Presumably your software will show up areas where things need to improve?
On the manager’s dashboard we have a full traffic light system of red, amber, green. If there’s something that needs immediate attention it’ll be red and be right in front of you, if something is going to expire it shows in amber and all the rest is green.
So you can have every aspect of the club on your phone on the dashboard at any point in time from anywhere in the world. Staff, training and safety compliance.
The alerts take the pressure off managers. Traditional systems tell the people at the top of the tree that they have to fix everything below it. Now, if I’m a part-time member of staff who’s working with you, or a junior team member and if there’s something that I need to do, if my training is going to expire, if there are weekly checks that I have to do – it tells me.
If I do it all, great, it doesn’t alert anyone else. But if I don’t fulfil my obligation, it reminds me – and if I keep not doing it, it reports up the ladder to managers.
We’re finding that we’re taking about 70% of the administration out overnight for managers. Because at the minute they’re either not getting to it or if they’re trying to get to it, they’re running and chasing whereas that communication goes to their team members, managers, staff all the way through. It’s that dissemination of responsibility re. the obligation side of things, but with a big safety net around it.
Do you feel the platform can revolutionise the golf club?
The easy answer is absolutely yes. We’ve won multiple different awards for innovative product of the year, Irish tech product of the year and we’ve recently been named one of the top fifty most innovative companies in the UK and Ireland, specifically for this golf product.
Obbi Golf are a GCMA official supplier. For more information, visit obbi.golf
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