When Rebecca Wormleighton, Co-Founder of Zendelity, discovered that Ottawa Public Health still requires pool operators to manage compliance using physical paper sheets and signatures, it became her ‘aha’ moment for how the company could work towards making a safer city of Ottawa.
“How can we expect businesses to be better and safer for the public when it’s the very regulations that are standing in the way?” Rebecca said. “Paper-based compliance has never truly been compliance because anyone can fill out a slip and call it a day, leaving managers guessing if the procedures and inspections were actually completed to standards that would eliminate risk. A quality compliance program means accuracy, accountability, and efficiency, and today’s regulations don’t enable those criteria.”
With the drive to revolutionize physical operating compliance across the city through digital transformation, Zendelity’s Smart City Ottawa initiative was born. “When we learnt about these outdated regulations for pool compliance, we thought ‘well there’s an easy idea, let’s start with pools!’” Rebecca stated.
Leveraging support from the L-Spark team, the initiative quickly got attention from the Mayors Innovation Table, a new initiative from Mayor Sutcliffe to work with local businesses on projects aiming to innovate to improve how the city operates and the wellbeing of its constituents.
With their support, Zendelity’s Smart ‘Safe’ City Ottawa initiative developed into a plan of action; bring together local businesses to discuss how digital transformation can make Ottawa a safer place to live, work and play. By collaborating across different industries, we can identify best practices and implement innovative solutions for compliance management that can help keep our communities and citizens safe.
“The first key to a Smart City, for us, is buy-in across the board, meaning we needed to start by bringing together regulators, city officials, and business leaders throughout all industries, to join in these discussions so we can collectively understand what compliance looks like right now, where it falls short, and how digital transformation can improve it.”
And start with pools they did, as they hosted their first Smart City Ottawa event on May 2nd at Hub350, bringing together leaders from a variety of businesses from real estate and long-term care, to education and public recreation centers.
One of the major highlights of the event, and a growing role within the Smart City Ottawa initiative, was the support and presence of the Mayors Innovation Table, specifically Councillor Curry who joined to kick off the event and touch on the importance of innovation for public safety, stating that despite the challenges and fears around change, “for a city, compliance is everything”.
The event was a resounding success with Rebecca ‘diving’ into the nature of pool compliance regulations today and engaging the attendees with their input on how digital transformation could be feasible within various industries and their constraints.
For the Zendelity team, this project won’t stop there, and they are already in the works of brainstorming their next event around emerging regulations and fines for false fire alarms due to poor maintenance.
“No one wants to neglect their safety but think about these operations teams and managers running on minimal resources and budgets while demands for operations increase from higher-ups, regulators, and consumer expectations. There is an opportunity for these processes to evolve and we want to get at the forefront of ensuring it happens.” Rebecca states.
We are super excited to see what’s next in store for Zendelity and their Smart City Ottawa initiatives and can’t wait to experience the Ottawa that can become, as they say, the safest city to live, work, and play.
To view the recording of the SCO event around pool compliance, grab a look here.
Interested in exploring Command Center for your business or saving your spot for the next Smart City Ottawa event? Email info@zendelity.com to get started.
About Zendelity Corporation: Founded in 2011, Zendelity is a SAAS-based startup for physical operating compliance management based in Ottawa, ON. With a mission to transform safety and compliance across the world, Zendelity has been partnering with local institutions to take on new projects in public safety, and recently completed the Hub350 x L-Spark Accelerator program as part of the 10th cohort of tech start-ups transforming Ottawa.
By Ihsan Yousif, Zendelity
