Intelex House Band to Rock GTA Tech Leaders Concert Series

Posted on May 23, 2013 by JP Nadeau

The GTA Tech Leaders Concert Series is happening on Thursday May 30th at The Sound Academy in Toronto. The event is in support of The Ride to Conquer Cancer and will feature bands made up of employees from some of Toronto’s leading tech companies. Intelex’s house band, The Kings of Strachan, are on the bill and will be tearing up a set of rock favourites among bands from KPMG, Ceridian and Smithson Martin.

The concert will be an ideal opportunity for Toronto’s tech industry professionals to get out of the office, meet some other industry professionals and enjoy a night of their peers providing some great entertainment. Tickets are $40 with 100% of the proceeds going to Ride to Conquer Cancer.

If you would like to attend you can purchase your tickets here. The password is “Intelex”

Intelex House Band to Rock GTA Tech Leaders Concert Series

New BLS report on workplace fatalities, growing role of MSDs in workplace injuries, Obama’s cabinet fight and more on EHS This Week

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Paul Leavoy

On This week’s edition of EHS This Week we’ve got the week’s top stories in environment, health and safety news:

A BLS report on how we can reduce workplace fatalities.
The increasing role of MSDs in workplace injury stats
The fight to implement key Obama cabinet members (EPA and DOL) and more!

Remember to write us with your suggestions, questions and comments. Also, if you are an industry expert and ever want to take part in the program, we’d love to have you.

Until next week, enjoy the program!

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New BLS report on workplace fatalities, growing role of MSDs in workplace injuries, Obama’s cabinet fight and more on EHS This Week

Staggering New incident and illness stats, NAOSH week, ISO updates and more on EHS This Week

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Paul Leavoy

On this week’s edition of EHS This Week we’ve got the week’s top stories in environment, health and safety news:

New stats on annual U.S. incident- and illness-related fatalities — and they’re alarming.
NAOSH week and why you should thanked your health and safety manager.
In addition to facing devastating workplace conditions, Bangladesh citizens might also have to deal with water scarcity.

Remember to write us with your suggestions, questions and comments. Also, if you are an industry expert and ever want to take part in the program, we’d love to have you.

Until next week, enjoy the program!

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Staggering New incident and illness stats, NAOSH week, ISO updates and more on EHS This Week

Maclean’s names Intelex Canada’s 12th greenest company!

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Paul Leavoy

Intelex was 12th in Maclean’s/Aon Hewitt’s The Green 30 2013 annual ranking of Canada’s greenest employers.

We’ve won awards for our corporate culture. Awards for financial performance. We’ve been named one of the Top 10 places to work in Canada at least four times in the last two years. But today we’re thrilled to be named one of Canada’s 30 greenest workplaces! And 12th at that – not too shabby!

That’s right, Intelex has been included in the Green 30 of 2013, a prestigious ranking of Canadian businesses that have incorporated environmental stewardship into their business model and corporate culture. The ranking, which covered businesses across the country of any size and scope, was determined by Aon Hewitt and Queen’s School of Business and published today in Canada’s venerated Maclean’s magazine.

“Across the company from frontline staff, to our pioneering Green Team, right up to the executive team we have fully embraced environmental stewardship and this ranking is a gratifying acknowledgement of the hard work we’ve put in to ensuring we minimize our negative environmental impact in the world,” noted Intelex President and CEO Mark Jaine. Check out the full story in our Press Room.

This achievement follows a string of recent wins for Intelex’s Green Team, including:

Slashing paper consumption through a paper conservation program.
Implemented Dyson hand dryers to replace paper towels. throughout the office bathrooms.
Building a beautiful organic garden on our patio.
Expanding a highly successful organics recycling program, and more.

Plans for 2013 include a full-scale power conservation program, implementing motion sensor lights, and restoring our organic garden for the summer. If you have ideas for us, send them out way – we’re always trying to come up with new ideas to minimize our environmental impacts.

In the meantime, we thank Maclean’s, Aon Hewitt, and Queen’s for this prestigious acknowledgement, not to mention our frontline staff, Green Team, and executive for being fully committed to environmental stewardship across all our activities!

Maclean’s names Intelex Canada’s 12th greenest company!

2013 World Conference on Quality and Improvement Focuses on Managing Change

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Alison Grenkie

Intelex’s Brett McLennan and James Coulen are in Indianapolis this week, talking to people about Quality Management at the 2013 World Conference on Quality and Improvement.

The annual conference is held by the American Society for Quality (ASQ), a community of nearly 80,000 quality professionals dedicated to promoting quality tools, principles and practices in workplaces and communities. With more than 100 sessions on this year’s theme, “Managing Change” attendees are sure to walk away with valuable information on maintaining and improving quality while navigating an evolving business landscape.

One of the most exciting changes is the ongoing development of a global marketplace, but with opportunity comes challenges: managing a global supply chain, ensuring compliance with international standards and regulations, and coordinating logistics on a global scale are just a few of the key issues that will be addressed at this year’s conference. The good news? Intelex may be able to help!

We offer many applications for environment, health and safety and business performance management, but understandably our focus at this conference is our Quality Management System. Intelex’s system allows you to integrate the management of all your quality-related activities across multiple departments and locations through one centralized online portal. Manage audits and inspections, ensure international regulatory compliance, manage suppliers and drive continual improvement, all from one spot!

If you’re at the conference and want to hear more about the Intelex approach to Quality Management, you can find Brett and James at booth #616. We hope to see you there!

2013 World Conference on Quality and Improvement Focuses on Managing Change

McDivitt Law Firm achieves a paperless office but what about the 1,000 leftover binders?

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Lauren Craig

McDivitt Law Firm went paperless last month – a big accomplishment for any organization, but one particularly onerous for law firms that house thousands of confidential legal documents. Each document requires particular care and attention to ensure everything is properly logged and maintained throughout the transition to a paperless office. McDivitt has been scanning documents and filing them away in their online Document Control system since June 2011 and to date have emptied over a thousand, three-inch binders containing approximate 456,000 sheets of paper!

The quest to go paperless came from a growing need to increase efficiency at a law firm that has seen an amazing 40% growth in staff over the last year across its three locations. Moving to a central web-based system would help save not only time, but would free up space for their growing head count. By removing hundreds of binders from the office they now have additional working space to accommodate new employees.

So what does one do with hundreds of binders? McDivitt decided to leverage their Facebook page to reach out to their community and offered up the binders free to schools, hospitals, churches, or any other organizations or small businesses that would be able to make use of them. As expected in this online social era, the response was fairly immediate and amazingly all one thousand plus binders have already been distributed to the local Colorado Springs school district, Habitat for Humanity, and a non-profit organization, TESSA. It’s a great feel-good story that rose out of a standard business need to be more efficient and scalable.

McDivitt Law Firm engages with their community quite frequently on their Facebook page, including PSA Video contests, updates on their Safe and Sober cab ride home program, job postings and other fun activities happening in and around their neighbourhood. So if you’re a Colorado Springs, Denver, or Pueblo community member, check them out, there’s lots of great information to be found!

Think you can go paperless too? Find out more about online document control.

McDivitt Law Firm achieves a paperless office but what about the 1,000 leftover binders?

Possible fertilizer plant inspection loophole, nuclear plant safety fail, EPA benefits outweigh costs, and more on EHS This Week

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Paul Leavoy

On this week’s edition of EHS This Week we’ve got the week’s top stories in environment, health and safety news:

The possibility that the West, Texas, fertilizer plant wasn’t inspected since 1985 as the result of a regulatory loophole.
An epic safety fail at a California nuclear plant.
The Office of Management and Budget finds that EPA’s benefits highly outweigh its costs, and more.

Remember to write us with your suggestions, questions and comments at paul@ehsthisweek.com. Also, if you are an industry expert and ever want to take part in the program, we’d love to have you.

Until next week, enjoy the program!

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Possible fertilizer plant inspection loophole, nuclear plant safety fail, EPA benefits outweigh costs, and more on EHS This Week

Intelex Exhibits at Partners In Prevention 2013 Conference

Posted on April 30, 2013 by JP Nadeau

The Partners in Prevention 2013 Health & Safety Conference & Trade Show is Canada’s largest health and safety event and the flagship of the Partners in Prevention Conference Series.

The conference sees more than 4,500 health and safety professionals from every sector come together to gain access to best practices, compliance advice and business solutions through over 60 interactive sessions, workshops and professional development courses. Over 400 exhibitors display products and services in the Trade Show portion of the conference where Intelex’s Jeremy Mawson and Ethan Fleming-Cushing are manning the Intelex booth and showcasing Intelex’s safety management software solutions.

To learn more about the Partners in Prevention 2013 conference visit the website here. or follow the action on Twitter with the hashtag #PIP_Conf.

Intelex Exhibits at Partners In Prevention 2013 Conference

OSHA poised to call for better tracking of temporary workers

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Paul Leavoy

According to a new OSHA memo released only a day after this past Sunday’s annual Workers’ Memorial Day, the agency is launching an initiative to better track the exposure of temporary workers to health and safety hazards. Recognizing a recent pattern of high-profile fatal accidents and the sheer volume of temporary employees in the U.S. workforce, OSHA hopes this new requirement will enable it to better protect foreign workers.

The move follows the recent death of a temporary worker on his first day of the job. Many temporary workers don’t have a strong proficiency with the English language and receive poor health and safety training.

“Employers have a duty to provide necessary safety and health training to all workers regarding workplace hazards,” the memo noted. “Recent inspections have indicated problems where temporary workers have not been trained and were not protected from serious workplace hazards due to lack of personal protective equipment when working with hazardous chemicals and lack of lockout/tagout protections, among others.”

According to the new memo, OSHA will require employers to tracking certain information during inspections and investigate worksites where temporary workers are employed. To capture this information, the agency created a new code for temporary workers, and if a Compliance Safety and Health Officer (CSHO) notices that temporary employees are exposed to dangerous or ‘violiative’ conditions, they have to enter a new code in the tracking system.

Check out the memo here.

OSHA poised to call for better tracking of temporary workers

Workers’ Memorial Day recognized around the world

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Paul Leavoy

Today is Workers’ Memorial Day, one of the biggest days in workplace health and safety, and there will be events around the world (and most likely right in your own community) honouring workers killed, disabled, injured or harmed at work.

As we know, every day 12 American workers go to work and never come home as a result of workplace fatalities. On a global level, as we learned once again from the tragic situation in Dhaka, Bangladesh reminds us, the statistics are disheartening. Basically, someone dies on the job every 15 seconds. That’s more people dying at work than fighting wars.

And as EHS Today points out, the National Council for Safety and Health (National COSH) has released a report in advance of Worker’s Memorial Day. The document links personal stories of workplace tragedy with data on government health and safety statistics to highlight the need for us all to work harder to avoid preventable workplace fatalities.

So today is a great opportunity to take pause and consider what you can do to improve the health and safety conditions of your workplace and to remember those who have been killed or injured at work in the past year.

(Pictured: Amicus Workers Memorial Tree, with floral tributes, Astley Park, Chorley, Lancashire by Joshthetree.)

Workers’ Memorial Day recognized around the world