A UC Davis software development team and its Safety Suite project are officially golden!

The UC Safety Suite, for research use, was among 10 projects recognized in the annual Larry L. Sautter Awards program. It honors faculty and staff for IT work that makes university operations more effective and efficient to better serve faculty, staff, students and patients.

The gold award-winning Safety Suite, serving all of UC, features more than 10 applications — with acronyms like BIO, HACEM and LHAT (we’ll spell those out later!) — providing researchers with a comprehensive way to manage workplace risks, meet institutional, state and federal safety requirements, and easily manage data associated with the researchers’ lab work and teaching.

The Safety Suite is a project of Information Technology Services, a unit of Safety Services in the Office of the Vice Chancellor and Chief Financial Officer. IT Services receives funding from the UC Office of the President for the Safety Suite project, which falls under the banner of UC Risk and Safety Solutions.

The UC Information Technology Leadership Council presented this year’s Sautter Awards on Aug. 17 during the UC Computing Services Conference at UC Riverside. Other awards — gold, silver and honorable mention — went to the Berkeley, Riverside, San Diego and San Francisco campuses, UC Health and UCLA Health, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

UC Davis’ gold award came a year after Information Technology Services won a Sautter silver award for six applications that would form the basis for the Safety Suite.

‘Clean and concise management’

“We are very pleased to be recognized for the UC Safety Integrated Suite,” said Safa Hussain, executive director of Information Technology Services, and Risk and Safety Solutions. “The suite as a whole represents the effort of our entire team and the many researchers from throughout the UC system who provided input on how we could improve efficiencies in their daily work.”

The UC Safety Suite comprises the following, all developed by the UC Davis team:

• BIO (Biosafety Information Online)
• BI (Business Intelligence dashboards)
• Chemicals
• EFR (Employer’s First Report)
• HACEM (Hazard Assessment and Chemical Exposure Monitoring)
• LHAT (Laboratory Hazard Assessment Tool
• OHSS (Occupational Health Surveillance System)
• Prepared
• SIT (Safety Inspection Tool)
• UC Safety Profile
• WASTe (Waste Accumulation Storage Tracking electronically)

And the team is still going strong — with these apps coming soon: UC Away, UC Radiation and Accommodate.

“Prior to the release of the UC Safety Suite, many of these processes were managed on paper or in legacy online systems that were not interrelated,” Hussain wrote in the Risk and Safety Solutions application for a Sautter Award. “What used to be a fragmented, labor intensive administrative experience is now a clean and concise management of lab data that is easily accessible at the touch of a hand.”

Further, Hussain wrote, the suite saves significant administrative time. There’s no more entering the same core lab information over and over; the suite asks for this information only once, then transfers the data to multiple suite products.

UC established the Sautter Awards in 2000 in memory of Larry L. Sautter, who, at the time of his death in 1999, served as UC Riverside’s associate vice chancellor for Computing and Communications. He led his campus in the development and implementation of a modern data network, client server computing and improved technical support services.

Read the UC story on all the 2015 Larry L. Sautter Awards. See the applications for all the projects that were up for consideration this year.

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