Intelex at NAEM’s 2013 EHS and Sustainability Software Conference

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Alison Grenkie

Today more than 20 leading software companies and service providers are gathering at the Blake Hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina to discuss their solutions with EHS and sustainability professionals.

The event is the 2013 EHS and Sustainability Software Conference, presented by the National Association for Environmental Management (NAEM). This conference is a two-day event and is the only conference dedicated to presenting the big name EHS and sustainability software solutions in one place for your consideration.

In addition to being a sponsor, Intelex is well-represented at this year’s gathering – our Vice President of EHSQ solutions, Elie Mouzon, is attending with sales director Bevin Lyon and account executive Jeremy Mawson. But we’re most excited to hear from one of our clients in the Food & Beverage industry, who will be presenting on Intelex this afternoon at 3:30pm.

One of the unique features of this particular conference is the live software demonstrations, which are presented by the users themselves. Our client will be discussing successful system design and implementation of the Intelex solution.

Our clients use Intelex globally for a wide variety of functions that include:

Property, safety, environmental and regulatory incident and near miss reporting, investigation and corrective action development.
Corporate wide safety metrics.
S&E Compliance task management.
Document control.
Corporate and self-audit completion, tracking and reporting.
Sustainability data management and reporting

If you’re an attendee and would like to speak to someone at Intelex about your needs, you can find us at booth #303!

The National Association for Environmental Management (NAEM) empowers corporate leaders to advance environmental stewardship, create safe and healthy workplaces, and promote global sustainability. Visit NAEM online here.

Evaluating EHS and Quality management software vendors: 10 essential questions you need to ask

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Paul Leavoy

In a flooded market of software vendors, finding the right fit for your needs can be a challenging. If you are seeking a solution to address EHS, quality, or general business performance needs, finding the best product for your business is critical and can lead to significant impacts on your bottom line. As a result, it is imperative to ask the right questions, both about the prospective vendor and the products they offer.

Some questions will be relevant the day you roll out your software, and some will be relevant months or years down the line. But asking the right questions today can save you money, time and headaches in the future.

1. Is the software able to generate automated emails and notifications from all parts of the system – not just core modules?

As your company gets more familiar with your software solution, your desire to automate more processes will increase. You need a scalable solution that allows you to grow your business over time without the risk of having to switch vendors in the future, a costly process.

2. Does it allow you to configure the screen layouts and change or add new fields?

As your company grows, you may decide to alter naming conventions, dropdown options, or add additional fields. If you can’t easily configure system elements yourself, you’ll have to return to the vendor for expensive customizations. You should seek software that allows you to configure layouts and add custom fields as your business needs evolve.

3. Can dashboards and homepages be configured? Can you set up different views of the dashboards and easily email dashboard contents to others?

As you become more comfortable with the software, you’ll identify more operations, trends, activities and KPIs to track. Look for a system that allows you to configure unlimited dashboards that refresh in real-time, providing an at-a-glance view on the status of key processes. You’ll also want the capacity to email dashboards directly to other employees, or to have them automatically emailed on a pre-defined schedule to managers, directors, VPs and other stakeholders.

4. Does the vendor have a mature support services program in place?

It sounds staggering, but nearly 40% of all implementations in this software industry suffer cost overruns, don’t meet deadlines, or even fail outright. In addition to getting assurance that your software deployment will be a success, it is vital to have quick and easy access to knowledgeable, friendly staff to answer your questions and address any challenges that might arise. The presence of an online community portal that connect you with others, provides resources like webinars training tools, and features a support forum.

5. How long has the prospective vendor been a player in the market?

While there are a number of credible, established businesses worthy of consideration, the EHS and quality software market is replete with startup and ‘fly-by-night’ companies. In evaluating software vendors, you need to be assured you are working with a company that is legitimate and boasts a strong presence in the market with a history of achievement. Since your chosen vendor will be handling, managing and manipulating your sensitive corporate data, you should be certain it can support a secure, reliable system.

6. Does the company have a large support staff and online community following?

If you are looking for a long-term vendor who will work with you, through all the challenges you may face, you need to know the company features a strong network of support infrastructure. Above and beyond a support line and email address, the hallmark of a business that deeply invests in the continued satisfaction of its clients is a robust online community portal that connects users with live support staff, training resources, technical documentation, and other clients. Such a resource is a testament to the vendor’s emphasis on customer service and support, and also signifies a commitment to transparency.

7. Is the company profitable and growing?

More than being an established player in this software industry, the vendor ought to be able to demonstrate both financial success and sustainability. As a client of a prospective vendor, your success in many ways will be tied to the company you choose. Find a company with a sound business model and a record of success to ensure the long-term viability of a business relationship and optimal ROI.

8. Mobility/Accessibility: Does the application support mobile devices and offer offline support in areas where you will not have cell coverage?

In this era of mobile communications, working solely from a stationary desk, at a computer is an increasingly irrelevant way of doing business. While stationary work will always be a dimension of the workplace, top-performing companies seek solutions that operate seamlessly across multiple platforms. In seeking your solution, find a vendor that provides a web-based solution that can be accessed and used on mobile devices such as smartphones and increasingly popular tablet computers.

9. Is the system able to handle multiple languages?

If you are an international business with sites spread across the globe, or if you have users that speak and read different languages, you would benefit tremendously from a resource that facilitates smooth translation of data and information across multiple languages. If this is a priority for you, look for a web-based system that allows multiple users to simultaneously access and manipulate data from different sites, in different languages, simultaneously.

10. Does the vendor have a narrow or broad focus?

Whether you are looking for a web-based system to manage your EHS, quality, or general business performance initiatives, your goals will evolve as your business grows. Any user who has had to access multiple software tools in disparate, isolated systems knows there is nothing more tedious than unintegrated, ‘siloed’ data. Since your business operates as an organic whole, no department, site or business unit is an island, and business decisions in one area will generate collateral impacts on other areas of business performance. When selecting your vendor, consider your short and long-term future needs, and consider whether a fully integrated management system might best accommodate your business goals. It will save you the time and headaches associated with managing common data across disparate systems as your business grows.

OSHA’s updated tool shed directive, updated EPA ethanol news and final rule, disabled worker injury rates and more on EHS This Week

Posted on August 10, 2012 by Paul Leavoy

On this week’s edition of EHS This Week we take a look at the top stories in environment, health and safety news, including:

Cal-OSHA’s campaign to get employers focused on heat concerned.
OSHA releasing an updated Tool Shed directive on procedures for eliminating workplace hazards in marine cargo handling.
Railroad whistleblower news, and a whole lot 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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Get back to the meaning of Quality with 9001: A Quality Odyssey

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Paul Leavoy

Think quality is boring? That can only be attributable to human error.

Sure: bolt sizes, calibrations, documents, procedures, work instructions…yeah, there’s nothing particularly compelling about all that, on the surface, anyway. Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll be surprised what you find.

If you missed our exclusive webinar, 9001: A Quality Odyssey, check it out whenever you like by heading over to our on-demand webinar library. This decidedly un-boring special presentation will open the pod bay doors of your mind by getting back to the meaning of quality management and turning to the very roots of standardization.

Far from a boring history lesson, A Quality Odyssey will link the quality standards of today to the very need for standardization and measurement in the first place, and look at the evolution of quality systems throughout the ages and what they mean for businesses today.

Sign up today to learn how to put your quality system to its fullest possible use…which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.

Decoding corporate culture: key questions to consider when evaluating that new job

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Kellie Hart

As I’m sure everyone has been told, the interview process is not only a way for a company to assess your fit, but also your opportunity to interview the company. You need to ask yourself the question, ‘Is this somewhere I would like to come to everyday?’ We are told over and over again that we spend more time with the people we work with than we do with our families, a fact that makes it all the more important to ensure that there is a cultural fit.

Many companies (especially in the tech industry) are moving towards developing corporate cultures that set them apart in order to foster employee engagement and thrive in a tight labour market. The problem is, a company’s corporate culture is not something that you can understand from looking at their mission statement or taking someone’s word for it – you need to experience it for yourself! One type of corporate culture is not suited for everyone; different personalities thrive in different cultures. This is why it is so important to ask questions and be observant throughout the entire interview process.

How do you experience a company’s corporate culture during the interview process? Arrive early for your interview! A lot of a company’s corporate culture can be observed while you sit in the waiting area.

Here are some key areas to take note of throughout the interview process:

Style

What is the dress code?
What is the energy level in the office? (e.g. is it buzzing, quiet, chaotic?)
Where is the office located? Is it a trendy neighborhood or an industrial park?
Does the company believe in work/life balance? What are the business hours?

Office Space

How is the office space arranged?
Who has an office and who has a cubicle?
Are senior executives hidden away on their own floor where you need special access?
What are the common areas used for?
What is displayed on the walls and posted on bulletin boards?
What do employees have on their desks?

Social

How do employees interact with one another?
How do employees interact with you? Are you acknowledged?
What does the company do for fun? What types of social events have they had in the past? How often? (Pictured is a shot from a recent monthly Intelex patio party.)
Are employees working in teams or independently?

Professional Development

What opportunities and resources are available for professional development?
What is the company’s policy on promoting from within?
How is success measured?
How are employees recognized?

Lastly, ask everyone you meet throughout the interview process how long they have been with the company and how they would describe the company’s culture. Take each opportunity to gage whether you are getting an individual perspective with a consistent underlying message. Most important, don’t be afraid to ask the tough questions!

The Top 3 Resources to check out before your Intelex interview

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Bryan Humphries

Interview preparation is everything and truly knowing who you are being interviewed by and what they actually do is critical to making a great impression. At Intelex, doing your research in preparation for your interview is a huge part in showing that you are interested and dedicated to the opportunity of working with us! After all, you are interviewing us, just as much as we are interviewing you. As a potential employee at Intelex – or any company for that matter – you will be responsible for representing the company and the product or service they offer. That being said, it should be something you believe in!

Here at Intelex we have so much content on our website and as a result it can be hard to focus on the key elements in a short time line. To make things a little simpler, as Intelex’s Corporate Recruiter I’ve put together a list of the top three links that really sum up who we are.

Learn more about Intelex, our products and everything we do by watching this presentation by Intelex President and CEO Mark Jaine.
Take a look at our Meet the Team page and video, the latter of which provides a great, unscripted perspective into the real world of Intelex. Our employee testimonials provide a great primer on what it’s like to work at Intelex.
Check out feature interviews with team members Tomas Kuras (embedded below), JP Nadeau and Cheryl O’Connor. Our Facebook Page is also another great way to view these testimonials ad get a sense of our corporate culture.

Got questions? Use the comments area below. And don’t forget to check back every second Wednesday for our Professional Development Office (PDO) blog series.

Intelex discusses Oil and Gas safety management in ISHN

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Paul Leavoy

As in other high-risk sectors, workplace safety is of utmost importance in the Oil and Gas industry, where the smallest of near-misses and at-risk behaviours can result in devastating consequences for frontline workers, not to mention catastrophic environmental impacts. In light of this, it’s hard to believe some oil and gas companies still rely on archaic, paper-based systems for EHS management. Yet in spite of the adoption of state-of-the-art EHS management systems by some industry leaders, paper- and spreadsheet-based systems are still in widespread use.

That said, the trend is changing and businesses are increasingly beginning to see how streamlined EHS management systems are ultimately investments with great returns that help companies navigate increasingly complex regulatory waters. Learn more about this dynamic by checking out my article “Goodbye to paper and spreadsheets” in the most recent issue of ISHN (Industrial Safety and Hygiene News). You’ll have to register to view the issue, but it’s free and ISHN is a great publication with a wealth of EHS news.

The organizational costs of incompetence

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Paul Leavoy

Yesterday we talked about how being trained doesn’t necessarily equate with competence. Today we’ll take a brief look at how that discrepancy can impact organizational performance.

To start, take a look at the picture to the right. Now, by no means are we casting aspersions on the capabilities of these two able-bodied young men by implying that they are incompetent, as the title above alludes. However, given the tremendous level of accuracy, acuity and precision required every day in their individual roles within their manufacturing setting, it’s a good entry point for this discussion to consider how one hole in their training could, at any point, on any day, engender compromised competence, thereby resulting in a possible environmental, health or safety-related disaster or impact product quality.

Training touches every part of your business

The benefits of a training program that cultivates actual competence are multifaceted and impact all aspects of corporate performance. Of course, on a day-to-day basis, competence reduces the probability of errors in all job functions, thereby boosting productivity and profitability. But above and beyond that, from a corporate perspective every organization has a moral, business and legal obligation to their employees in terms of education, and a good training strategy will address each facet in a comprehensive way.

For example, a business has a moral obligation to ensure employees are sufficiently trained in their job function so as not to suffer injuries or encounter preventable illnesses on the job. In business terms, should an employee get injured or become sick at work there is the potential of a variety of costs that may impact the organization’s bottom line, including claims, lost time, and fines associated with regulatory infractions. From a legal perspective, if an employee is injured in, let’s say a manufacturing setting, they could initiate a lawsuit against the organization and claim that they were insufficiently trained. In such a situation, if the business could not produce documented evidence to clearly prove the employee was provided with required training, it would be on the hook for substantial damages and other consequences, not to the always mention unavoidable legal fees.

Competence boosts retention

Beyond the business-critical advantages to a comprehensive training strategy outlined above, a powerful byproduct of such an approach is, quite simply, that a competent employee is a happy employee. By ensuring employees are fully prepared to appropriately fulfill all of their job requirements, they suffer less stress over the tactical elements of their job, and enjoy greater confidence and increased motivation to do their job better.

Further, organizations that take a holistic, continual approach to training and skill-building will ultimately cultivate the sentiment among its workforce that the employer genuinely cares for the employee. While this all leads a higher level of morale among staff and an enhanced focus on quality, the most notable benefit is that retention rates will be greatly improved, and attrition rates will fall. Happy, competent employees who feel they are adequately equipped to excel in their duties are less inclined to leave their organization and more inclined to contribute to their employer’s success.

So how do you do it? Well, you start with a training strategy, the subject of tomorrow’s post.

Is your trained employee competent?

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Paul Leavoy

It happens all the time. A worker makes a misstep in his or her day-to-day duties. The mistake leads to a serious injury, compromised product quality, negative environmental impacts, or even a fatality. “But they were trained,” the supervisor responsible for the employee in question objects. Trained, indeed – but were they competent in their job?

This situation is a regular occurrence in workplaces around the world and it speaks to a widespread and persistent discrepancy in many conventional approaches to training management: the gulf between simply delivering training and ensuring actual competency. Organizations that have achieved success know the value of a comprehensive, robust training program. Streamlined onboarding of new employees and ongoing training – and, critically, training tracking – throughout the course of their professional development can, if delivered effectively, lead to a more effective and responsible workforce, and greater retention rates. After all, while the costs associated with recruiting, training, support and professional development can be great, any seasoned business owner knows it is even more expensive to lose those employees.

A widespread problem, however, is that too often employers equate training with competency. They assume that since an employee has sat in a classroom and completed a course, that they are competent – a very inaccurate presumption. The following misconceptions contribute to some traditional views on corporate training:

Any and all training is good training, so we ought to train for the sake of training.
Simply having employees sit in a classroom means they are competent.
The availability of training material is sufficient enough to induce learning.
Subject-matter experts (SME) are able to train other staff based on tenure (that is, the notion that longer-serving employees are more capable of delivering training).
That robust training is not necessarily worth the investment and ROI is too difficult to capture.

As with the mistaken belief that training is tantamount to competence, all these assumptions lead to false conclusions. But above and beyond how these misconceptions are engendered it is important to clarify what is actually meant by competence in an organizational context. Essentially, ‘competence’ refers to an employee’s ability to do their job properly. But establishing competency within an organization is not something that just happens, nor is it something that will be necessarily produced by the provision of an otherwise robust and seemingly comprehensive training program. Instead, a systematic approach featuring a nuanced training strategy is an essential prerequisite for employee competence.

Competency certainly sounds like something that would be an advantageous element to cultivate within a corporate culture, if not an essential element of doing business. However, the intrinsic value of a training program that engenders competency is not always immediately apparent to upper management whose buy-in is critical to the success of any training strategy.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss how training impacts different areas of business performance, and on Thursday we’ll talk Training and Competency Strategy.

Defining your quality initiatives

Posted on July 9, 2012 by Maxim Ivlev

Improving quality and efficiency in an organization can often seem like a difficult task, given the numerous approaches out there. Some companies believe their quality improvement initiatives are strong enough to withstand any obstacle in the marketplace, whereas other companies fail to have a strong enough stance on the subject entirely. This can be as a direct result of poor leadership and accountability, cultural resistance, and even poor planning.

In a recent article posted on QualityDigest.com, George Maszle summaries an excellent input-process-output (IPO) chart, called Quality and Productivity Improvement Processes, focusing on 10 positive factors that can be implemented in the workforce for a more productive and value-based development. Some of these factors include selecting the right people and projects, integrated training, and enterprise-wide knowledge training, to name a few.

Once these elements are executed across the board, they create five desired quality outputs as a result, which are: Improved value for customers, shareholders and society; improved intellectual capital; top line growth, bottom line growth; and positive cultural change. Based on these five performance measures, many organizations who implemented this formula, according to Maszle, achieved moderate results with certain inputs, while other inputs resulted in significant success.

Every organization is unique in its own way, resulting in different values, cultures, responsibilities, and ultimately different goal setting. Finding a sustainable quality formula that suits your organizational goals will help define positive characteristics within your company and bring you success moving forward.