Robert Claypool grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, and spent much of his childhood helping his father, a small business owner. He learned the basics of running of business, but most importantly, came to understand the discipline and determination needed to provide good customer service. The values his father instilled in him remained through adulthood. Robert graduated with an Electrical Engineering degree but always kept a passionate hold on entrepreneurship. He started new businesses on his own and with partners throughout his career. His education combined with his business experience provided insight in both the technical and management components needed for a successful company. Unfortunately, there were no systems that could provide an economical way to manage a small or medium size company. Robert started laying the foundation for a framework that could be used to efficiently manage a business.
Starting in 2011, he was contracted by a large oil & gas company to perform site audits of their vendors. Through these audits, Robert witnessed firsthand that accurate management of core components was difficult to achieve, regardless of size or revenue of the company. He witnessed companies managing employees on spreadsheets as well as some using whiteboards in a conference room. Robert continued to be disappointed in the quality of this assurance tracking. There were incredibly successful companies that couldn’t figure out how to eliminate expired certifications of key personnel and/or avoid potential fines, all which were caused by simple tracking errors. The better equipped companies were able to afford multiple resources to manage their requirements, however, even with those resources, their time was spent chasing down records, when that time could have been better spent improving their company’s culture.
In the midst of Robert’s auditing role, and the development of his framework, a family friend came to Robert with a dilemma. His employee was turned away at a job site for an expired certificate. He asked Robert to help him with a spreadsheet to do a better job of tracking his employees’ due dates. Robert’s response was, “I’ll do you one better, forget a spreadsheet. Let’s develop a tracking system!”. This became the spark and catalyst for KAStrack. Robert reached out to a developer to create a simple tool for tracking employee certifications. This tool would use a red-light/green-light system to alert users of their expiring requirements and allow them to log-in to submit those requirements. More importantly, it would give management a snapshot of their compliance.
The initial version of KAStrack was released to the public on September 10, 2013. It has grown a lot since then, including management components for assets, meetings, documents, reports forms, budgeting, detailed competency assessments, and online training. And although it has continued to expand in the feature set, we are proud that efficiency and compliance continue to be the underlying principles of all that we do.
