A safety culture expands beyond the confines of physical walls and core hours. To effectively manage ever-evolving regulatory requirements, increasingly flexible work arrangements, and rapidly changing business demands, modern-day safety programs must be as adaptable as the individuals who maintain them.
No one knows this better than Rustin Keller. As president and CEO of J. J. Keller & Associates, Inc., Keller has embraced emerging technologies and contemporary business strategies in the continuous pursuit of safety and compliance — a progressive approach that’s helped transform J. J. Keller from a primarily print-based publishing company to a growing intellectual property hub.
“We believe empathy for the end user is the key to long-term success. J. J. Keller continues to grow because we remain focused on a core purpose — helping customers comply with complex regulatory requirements. To remain relevant, we encourage our associates to experiment, but always within that core purpose,” said Keller.
This customer-first mentality has paid off big for the privately held, family-owned organization. Over the past 65 years, J. J. Keller & Associates, Inc. has grown to become an undisputed industry leader serving over 600,000 customers nationwide. Today, over 90% of Fortune® 1000 companies depend on J. J. Keller’s expert insights and flexible solutions to help mitigate risk, drive performance, and ensure compliance.
We expect our associates to be in front of customers as often as possible,” said Keller. “It’s the reason our products continue to set the standard for quality and comprehension.”
According to Keller, today’s safety professionals are under more pressure than ever before. Tasked with maintaining a safe, compliant workplace, individuals working in safety must strategically assess risk while developing proactive measures to help prevent future incidents — and that’s on top of a wide range of time-consuming regulatory tasks and recordkeeping requirements.
“Our research shows that firms don’t typically employ a full-time safety manager until they reach 500 associates or more — and even then, the ratio remains at 500:1 as the organization continues to grow. So, while we’re always trying to pack as much value as possible into our solutions, we’re cognizant to do so in ways that make sense for our customers. Convenience is critical,” said Keller.
Enter the J. J. Keller® SAFETY MANAGEMENT SUITE. Built for organizations of all sizes, this ready resource delivers unlimited access to all of J. J. Keller’s most popular safety management tools, including interactive training programs, audit and inspection checklists, written safety plan templates, word-for-word federal and state regulations, and more.
“The J. J. Keller® SAFETY MANAGEMENT SUITE provides EHS professionals with a single reference point from which they can efficiently manage all of their regulatory responsibilities. Training, incidents, chemicals, news — everything you need to develop a full-service safety program — it’s all there,” said Keller.
Senior Director of Research & Development Bob Larsen, who oversaw the development of J. J. Keller’s latest cloud solution, shared a similar sentiment.
“The J. J. Keller® SAFETY MANAGEMENT SUITE is — without a doubt — our most comprehensive offering to date,” said Larsen. “It really is an ‘all-in-one’ resource.”
In addition to providing access to a wealth of world-class safety management tools, the J. J. Keller® SAFETY MANAGEMENT SUITE can also be customized to meet any number of organizational and industry demands, allowing for superior oversight and unmatched visibility.
“Many solutions address specific aspects of safety management, but few have the potential to completely transform your business. Ours does,” Keller added.
Larsen was also quick to note that J. J. Keller’s vast subject-matter expertise makes them a premier compliance partner.
“We’re unique in our ability to not only provide the right tools and applications, but to ensure all of our content and intellectual property — like our training, for example — is leveraged, integrated, and validated at all levels,” said Larsen. “I think that added peace of mind really makes a difference [to customers].”
A superior safety solution was always the end goal, of course. Engineered to exceed all expectations, the J. J. Keller® SAFETY MANAGEMENT SUITE is the result of a massive, multi-year research effort that tapped over 2,000 safety professionals across the country.
“When we decided to rebuild KellerOnline — our flagship cloud management solution — we knew we had an opportunity to really take this product to another level. We spent years gathering input from industry thought leaders, leveraged their insight at every phase of development, and made key design decisions with customers top of mind,” said Keller.
According to Larsen, this exhaustive research effort was instrumental to “delivering a best-in-class solution from concept to reality.”
“To provide lasting value to our customers, we need to first understand the challenges they’re facing on a day-to-day basis. Thanks to a concrete research strategy, we were able to pinpoint and improve KellerOnline’s most popular features in ways that were particularly impactful to customers,” said Larsen.
To emphasize this point, Keller highlighted the suite’s expanded mobile capabilities.
“We know that round-the-clock accessibility encourages proactive compliance, so we spent a great deal of time developing an intuitive mobile platform that enables just that,” said Keller. “Now, employees can easily contribute to an audit or report an incident on the go, which goes a long way towards mitigating risk at the operations level.”
Larsen also pointed to the suite’s flexible search options as another example of customer input at work.
“We found that many customers were having difficulties locating industry- and state-specific regulatory information within our solution, which isn’t all that surprising when you consider just how much content we actually offer. This prompted us to reassess the suite’s search capabilities and resulted in the addition of various filters — topic, state, industry, governing body, you get the idea."
Larsen believes it’s practical modifications like these that will ultimately set the J. J. Keller® SAFETY MANAGEMENT SUITE apart from other solutions.
“Small changes can add up quickly. At the end of the day, this solution will save our customers a great deal of time and effort, allowing them to focus their attention where it matters most,” said Larsen.
And if that weren’t enough, a subscription to the J. J. Keller® SAFETY MANAGEMENT SUITE also includes Enterprise-class implementation services at no added cost.
“As I touched on earlier, we’re always trying to find new ways to add value to our products. That’s why we’ve bundled a lot of unique ‘perks’ into our base subscription package — things like complimentary user training and data onboarding. It’s just one more way for us to show our commitment to customer success,” said Keller.
While this empathetic approach may seem out of place in an industry often centered on bottom-line benefits, Keller is the first to admit he’s focused on far more than just building business.
“The work we do here matters. We help protect people’s lives every day, and frankly, I don’t think you can do that without fully realizing what’s at stake,” said Keller. “In terms of the J. J. Keller® SAFETY MANAGEMENT SUITE, I’d say that’s what I’m most proud of — the fact that our team addressed our customer’s core concerns head on, and in doing so, created something really special.”