How SGS Hit 26% User Adoption Rate with Intelex App Builder

SGS is the world’s leading testing, inspection, and certification company, operating across 2,600 sites with 96,000 employees globally. Originally founded as a grain inspection house in France, SGS now delivers expert services that help customers ensure product quality, safety, regulatory compliance, and operational efficiency. Its core offerings span testing, inspection, and certification across industries, supporting global needs in areas like health, safety, sustainability, and innovation. SGS is committed to advancing worker safety, environmental protection, and risk management, and continues to invest in digital transformation and custom solutions—like Intelex software—to maintain the highest standards of quality and performance worldwide.

Outcome

By leveraging Intelex’s App Builder, SGS was able to design and deploy highly customized applications tailored to the specific needs of its global operations. This flexibility allowed SGS to build tools from the ground up—such as incident management, near-miss reporting, vehicle inspections, and behavior-based safety apps—that aligned closely with the workflows and requirements of frontline employees. The ability to adapt and evolve these apps ensured high adoption and practical usability, making safety processes more efficient, user-friendly, and integrated into daily tasks.

The Challenge for SGS

Before implementing Intelex, SGS faced major challenges in managing its health, safety, and environmental (HSE) processes. Reporting was entirely manual, relying on paper forms and dozens of Excel spreadsheets to compile statistics. This approach made it extremely difficult to track incident investigations, corrective actions, and overall safety performance in a reliable, transparent way. There was no traceable visibility into safety events, which hindered SGS’s ability to identify trends, enforce accountability, and respond effectively to risks across its global operations.

Another key challenge was ensuring that any new software solution would fit seamlessly into the daily work of end users. SGS recognized that even the best tools would fail if they weren’t practical for frontline employees. The company needed a platform that could be tailored to its complex, varied operational needs while also being simple enough to encourage widespread adoption. This made customizability a critical requirement—SGS sought a system flexible enough to evolve with the organization and adaptable to different regions, business units, and regulatory environments.

"We tend to create tools from scratch, so having the app builder is a big advantage because we can utilize the existing structure of Intelex backed by our own business and operational needs. That is a big plus."

Mikki Teodoro, Global Operations Integrity (OI) Communications and IT

"A very visible success for us was the drastic improvement we saw in incident rates in 2014. In that year, besides new leadership, the system finally 'landed.' We had reached a point where users started to put trust in the platform and saw the value of using it in keeping safety at the core of our operations."

Mikki Teodoro, Global Operations Integrity (OI) Communications and IT

"Over the course of implementation, 2,700 reports have been created via the Business Intelligence tool by the SGS global team, including regional system administrators. The current system includes all 1,700 valid sites in SGS with a current inventory of 25,000 active users all over the world "

Mikki Teodoro, Global Operations Integrity (OI) Communications and IT

How Intelex Helped SGS

Intelex helped SGS by transforming its manual, paper-based HSE reporting processes into a centralized, digital system that provided reliable, traceable data. Before Intelex, SGS struggled with fragmented reporting and lacked visibility into incident investigations and corrective actions. By implementing Intelex, SGS was able to standardize and automate key processes like incident, hazard, and near-miss reporting, which allowed the company to collect more accurate data and produce meaningful insights without overwhelming users. This shift significantly improved SGS’s ability to monitor safety performance and respond proactively to risks across its global operations.

A key factor in SGS’s success was the Intelex App Builder, which allowed the company to customize applications to fit real-world operational needs. SGS developed and tailored numerous apps—including incident management, behavior-based safety, and vehicle inspections—that aligned closely with employee workflows, driving strong adoption across 1,700 sites and 25,000 users. The ability to build and refine these tools internally helped SGS maintain flexibility, integrate new functions like vehicle telematics, and link the system to platforms such as Power BI, ensuring the solution remained scalable and effective as the company’s needs evolved.