Tech for Crew Safety | Christian Damstra from Damstra Technology

DISCLAIMER: Below is an AI generated transcript. There could be a few typos but it should be at least 90% accurate. Watch video or listen to the podcast for the full experience!

Christian Damstra 0:00
Everybody’s got to be kept safe. And there’s a lot of paperwork behind that we take care of all of that for you.

Alexander Ferguson 0:11
Welcome, everyone to UpTech Report. This is our Applied tech series UpTech Report is sponsored by TeraLeap. Learn how to leverage the power of video at teraleap.io. Today, I’m very excited to be joined by my guest Christian Damstra, who’s currently based in Denver, Colorado, originally from Australia. He’s the CEO of Damstra Technologies. Welcome. Good to have you on. Yeah, thanks for having me. Absolutely. Now, your product is a workplace management platform to track, manage and protect your workers and assets, particularly for the blue collar workspaces, such as mining, construction, manufacturing, to name a few. So for those who are involved in safety, and HR and those types of companies, this might be an intriguing platform you want to check out now on your site, Christian, you reference, they have actually more than 500 Blue Chip clients across the globe, more than 4200 customers worldwide, and more than 550,000 users on the platform. That’s a lot of folks tell me, what was the problem that you initially saw and experienced that led you to develop this platform?

Christian Damstra 1:12
Yeah, thanks for asking. It’s for us, it’s really about safety and keeping people safe on the worksite. So many years ago, when we first started the organization just on 20 years ago, now, we had 250 employees of our own working in the field every single day, in the black hole mining industry. And we really struggled to keep those people safe. And when I say keeping them safe, it’s about making sure they’ve got the right skills, the right training, the right competencies. They’re not under the influence of drugs and alcohol, they’re not fatigued, and all those important things that happen in workplaces every day around the world.

Alexander Ferguson 1:47
So you were originally running a mining operation correctly, and that you need

Christian Damstra 1:51
mining labor higher company said providing labor into those mining operations.

Alexander Ferguson 1:56
Gotcha. And so you saw this and experienced this issue of being able to track and manage this hole. All the assets and the people tell me how was that then led to the technology beginning? Was it five, five years ago?

Christian Damstra 2:10
Pretty good. Oh,

Alexander Ferguson 2:12
yeah. A lot more than that. Just a few. How is that the technology changed over this time? And and where is it today?

Christian Damstra 2:20
Yeah, absolutely. So when we first started, we set it up to track, manage and protect our own employees on those different work sites. Over the years, what we found was our customers more and more wanted to use our platform as well. So we actually branched out and made it a pure technology company. And that’s all we are today. We’re no longer in the labor hire field or anything like that. But what we’ve done over the years to really enhance our platform is turn it into a true platform. So we were the only platform on the market that we know of in the areas we work out of the United States. So North America, South America, right through to Australia or Africa, New Zealand, to name just a few that has an end to end platform. So we can take care of your paperwork submission through to your access control, your alcohol testing at the gate, your actual gates, all the way through your skills, coms compliance, paperless forms elearning, just to name a few. But the most powerful part of our platform is orchestration, we actually have an orchestration layer, and we work with our customers so that anything they’ve already got on their site doesn’t need to be ripped and replaced. We can interface with it that allows to orchestrate that solution to provide the safety no matter what you’re using.

Alexander Ferguson 3:31
Gotcha. There’s kind of two questions that pop in my head. First is what are people using before using your service? Your this platform, what would they have in place?

Christian Damstra 3:40
Yeah, many different things. Some companies are doing it on Excel spreadsheets, some people are doing it in folders on the bookcase. Some people are using a myriad of other products to do this. So they may already have an access control system, they may already have an E learning system, they may have a few of those different systems. What we do is orchestrate all those solutions together using our proprietary tools to give them the safest possible outcome and the most efficient way to manage it.

Alexander Ferguson 4:07
It sounds like integration is one big thing for you. It’s very important for either you have all the capabilities are you integrate with whatever platforms they are already using. How long does it take for like a onboarding or just getting somebody into using this type of platform?

Christian Damstra 4:21
It varies. I mean, depending on the size of the customer, what parts of their product they’re going to use. We have some customers that are on boarded within 48 hours of them reaching out and signing up. We have others we have to spend a few months really defining the site setting the site up and bringing all the current skills, competencies, training, needs analysis and all that into play.

Alexander Ferguson 4:41
What’s the business model for you? Is it based on the number of users in there? Is it just a flat fee? How does that work?

Christian Damstra 4:47
Yeah, we’re we’re true software as a service company sells per person per year. And then it’s per item of hardware per month. We actually have our own hardware range that couples very well with the product to support the access control and all that Electronic testing, including facial temperature at access point,

Alexander Ferguson 5:04
how we understand that like the real problem, that you’re the folks that you’re working with in HR and safety that they’re facing, and they’re feeling if you had to just describe that shortly, very briefly, what does that paint it or feeling,

Christian Damstra 5:15
reduce litigation exposure and keep people safe. I mean, everybody’s got to be kept safe. And there’s a lot of paperwork behind that we take care of all of that for you.

Alexander Ferguson 5:28
What’s probably the most exciting new feature you guys are launch, I saw something in your site about like fall detection. Also, I was like, just tell me some of the latest features that you’re you’re excited about sharing?

Christian Damstra 5:36
Absolutely. So we recently acquired an organization called volta, which has rolled into our platform called dancer solo. Solo is a quite a unique app that you can run on your phones, your watches, your apple, watch your Samsung, watch your Android watch. And while using it on a wearable, we’re able to pick up slips, trips and falls, we’re able to track your GPS position, your heart rate monitor, and were able to alert your employer if any of those things become a problem at any time.

Alexander Ferguson 6:03
If you had to share a word of wisdom to a someone in HR or worse, or safety space at one of these companies, or there has to do with deaths or or not, what’s the word of wisdom you could share?

Christian Damstra 6:14
Well, that’s a really interesting one. I think the biggest challenge these people are under is managing so many different people in particular, they’re itinerant workers. If you think you can do this manually, or with disparate systems, you can’t.

Alexander Ferguson 6:30
In today’s day and age, you need technology to be able to manage the quantity and the type of people and all that the things that need to be tracked.

Christian Damstra 6:37
Absolutely. I’m going to give you an example, fatigue is a major problem on a lot of sites and people working excessive hours is a major problem for your organization. We have people recording things and sending out live alerts in real time. If people exceed for example, 280 hours in 28 days, they’re How are you going to do that using any manual system or any system that’s not automated?

Alexander Ferguson 7:00
Automation is powerful technology when you can get it in there and start using Where do you see the company in five years from now? Let what’s the vision, the roadmap that you can share?

Christian Damstra 7:10
Look, we’re an Australian Stock Exchange listed organization, we’ve been on the exchange for just over 12 months now, we’ve always had a vision to be a small Australian success story in a global marketplace. And we want to be out there and be seen as the world leader in this space. And now we’re certainly heading in the right direction for that. Awesome.

Alexander Ferguson 7:27
Well, thank you so much for joining us for those that want to learn more about their product be able to go to damstratechnology.com Is that right? Or was it damstratechnology.com, and you’re able to get in touch and probably see it get a demo of how their their product works. Thank you so much, Christian, for joining us. For those who want to hear more about his journey, the founders journey, stick around for part two of our discussion where we get to hear some of those insights and lessons learned over the years. We’ll see you guys on part two of our discussion. Thanks again for joining us. That concludes the audio version of this episode. To see the original and more visit our UpTech Report YouTube channel. If you know a tech company, we should interview you can nominate them at UpTechreport.com. Or if you just prefer to listen, make sure you’re subscribed to this series on Apple podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcasting app.