Ventiv Technology

3 0 | 360º Aon eSolutions e Ledcor Group is a private, employee- owned construction company with subsidiaries that also provide marine tug and barge, aviation and carbon- management services to their clients. Founded in 1947 in Alberta, Canada, the company now operates out of 20 offices across North America. LTS specializes in wireline and wireless network construction, installation, commissioning, maintenance and repair services across North America. We spoke with Rob Weiss, director of Health, Safety and Environmental Protection at LTS, about the company's use of the Aon eSolutions SafetyLogic automated learning management system. safety and risk management go hand in hand Understanding the risks of a project and planning for those possible risks is one area where safety management and risk management intersect, according to Weiss. LTS now takes a proactive and prevention-oriented approach to forecasting risk. "We're very much moving toward analyz- ing our risks as soon as we get an opportu- nity to bid on a job—specifically, identifying the opportunities and the challenges," Weiss asserts. "So, health and safety are now becoming much more of a business discus- sion along with the other risks." "Safety is not just about 'don't put your hand into that spinning wheel'—but the other reasoning behind it is that we don't want employees to get hurt, and also that there is a risk to the company on a larger scale," he continues. Helping employees understand this bigger picture is another aim of safety training, he said. Steve Hirsch, Territory Vice President at Aon eSolutions, worked closely with Weiss and Ledcor to implement SafetyLogic. He adds that, "LTS has an industry-leading vision of integrating safety management and risk management when making business decisions. ey use the SafetyLogic system to drive safety awareness and best practices into the DNA of each of their employees." (See "e Case for Integration," opposite, for more on integrating safety and risk management.) rapid growth and a new approach "We quickly grew from a few hundred employees in 2008 to almost 1,000 today, and we started to be concerned about getting all of our new employees through important safety training that was not only required for compliance, but that we knew would protect employees as well as mitigate risk," Weiss explains. Executive management at LTS was aware that as the number of workers increased, the chance for safety incidents to occur could also rise. Another factor, Weiss says, was that the nature of the work also changed significantly. ere is a strong culture at LTS that supports health and safety, Weiss notes, and educating workers to help prevent injuries on the job is always a top priority. On a logistical level, bringing all the new employees through necessary training using the company's previous classroom model would take too many hours of scheduling, too many airline flights and too much time to track the results. After a good deal of research, LTS adopted the SafetyLogic system to help them manage their training program. varied locations made automated training a good fit "An additional challenge was that many of our new employees were independent workers in scattered locations or working from their homes," Weiss says. Other parts of the company, he notes, may have incremental increases in the number of employees based on a particular project in one location. Since those projects have a finite lifespan, those workers would be trained and then move on to the next project, Weiss says: "It's much easier to control training in that kind of situation." "So, we had variance in locations as well as rapid growth in the numbers of employees," Weiss continues. "We just couldn't bring everyone together in one classroom anymore, and automated training made good sense." With multiple locations to consider, Weiss notes that it would take nearly a year to schedule 490 employees for three initial training courses, and would entail booking facilities and sending staff out to facilitate the classes. "Now, we can get those employees up to speed in two weeks," he says. "We tell them you have from March 1st to the 15th, for example, to go through the courses that are available online. no more costly training programs Because training is automated, and there is no need to rent facilities or fly staff to different locations to conduct classroom training, Weiss estimates that using SafetyLogic saves LTS "hundreds of thousands of dollars a year" on training. "We have also seen a reduction in incidents, but it's very hard to attribute that to any one factor," Weiss says. When Ledcor Technical Services (LTS), a division of The Ledcor Group of Companies, began rapid growth a few years ago, it became clear that their safety training approach would need to change. Along with growth came a need for a more focused integration of safety management and risk management. As it turned out, Aon eSolution's SafetyLogic is helping them do both.

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