Agnico Eagle is a senior Canadian gold mining company that has produced precious metals since 1957. Its eight mines are located in Canada, Finland and Mexico, with exploration and development activities in each of these countries as well as in the United States and Sweden.
The Intelex Program Maturity award recognizes a customer that has shown outstanding growth and maturity leveraging the Intelex system to realize business goals.
Agnico Eagle purchased the integrated EHS Management solution from Intelex in 2011, replacing their old Excel spreadsheets that had become inefficient. With Intelex’s centralized approach to training, incident management, inspections and other critical business activities, Agnico Eagle has streamlined communication across multiple divisions worldwide.
The Intelex system provided a centralized place for all of Agnico Eagle’s mine sites to enter EHS incidents, near misses, and hazards in a standardized and consistent format. Not only has this level of standardization across their business operations helped the organization streamline their preparation for audits and regulatory reports, but sites can now also compare performance. Lessons learned from one mine are effectively shared between sites quickly and easily, allowing each location to take a proactive approach to safety, preventing incidents before they occur. The team has also simplified and prioritized initiatives internally by creating unique dashboards for each of their mines, designed to allow users to view their location’s performance in real time.
Implementing the EHS management solution has dramatically decreased the reaction time for Agnico Eagle. Whereas prior, the company was only viewing information on a monthly basis, now workers review insights from the dashboards and reports aggregated in Intelex during weekly safety meetings, shifting to a proactive approach to their environmental, health and safety program. This approach has allowed Agnico Eagle to identify and react faster to risk across their business and operations.
Agnico Eagle’s success is a factor of effective program and software adoption. Over the course of three years, Agnico Eagle saw their user base grow by over 2700%. The cultural shift that the company began with their EHS project has not only proved effective in reducing incident occurrences over time, but also in increasing engagement with their larger workforce as they embrace the new safety culture. Since 2011, Agnico Eagle Mines has realized a dramatic decrease in Accident Frequency Rates, moving from a rate of 3.23 in 2011, to 1.90 in 2011, to a rate of 1.16 in 2015. Intelex helped nurture this cultural shift by providing a consistent, user-friendly, and seamless method of automating Agnico Eagle’s EHS program.
