case study

Online Inductions At The Coal Face

The Challenge

At the commencement of this project, this major contractor operated several coal mine sites within the Qld Bowen Basin. At this stage, the Coal Mining Act legislation was amended to make Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) a mandatory requirement. This change required all existing employees and sub contractors to be trained in the new procedures, and all future employees and subcontractors would also need to undertake the training before commencing work.

The safety and training departments in conjunction with the Senior Site Executives (SSE), identified the need to develop a low impact/ high result solution to undertake this mammoth training and compliance exercise which lay ahead of them both immediately and ongoing into the future.

The Solution

Based on our existing relationship with the mining contractor, wherein we had already pioneered removing site inductions off site for a couple of their major operations, and conducting them from regional centres, we were taken on as project managers to develop an appropriate induction system.

The initial step was to assess the current site requirements and future developments for the system. We advised that this was an ideal opportunity to bring all operations onto one generic induction platform as opposed to the existing stand alone site structure. It was decided an electronic system would be used which had to meet the following criteria:

• Able to be easily navigated by an industry not usually associated with high computer literacy,
• The platform had to allow access to both generic and site specific training content,
• Inductions had to be task focused as opposed to “blanket style”, ability to recognise generic content and only deliver “gap” training as inductees moved from site to site,
• Self paced,
• Track expiry dates,
• Ability to assess and re-assess content,
• Produce some form of training report, and
• Produce an audit trail of training undertaken.

The Outcome

No “off the shelf” product was readily available, requiring us to develop a system to meet the projects requirements. This was successfully developed and implemented into the mining contractor organisation.

Initial trials on one of the clients major sites proved extremely successful with the remaining sites looking to come on board at the earliest available opportunity. Inductee feedback was surprisingly positive with comments of “this is the best induction I have ever done” being voiced on a daily basis.

The very inefficient practices used previously in the induction process were successfully streamlined. Immediate benefits were noticed in the:

• Content and assessment development phase,
• The training delivery phase, and
• The administration and filing nightmare phase at the end.

In addition to this, surveyed sub contractors recorded substantial time and money savings by undertaking inductions via the new system.

The flexibility of being able to undertake inductions 5 days per week has also been identified as a major positive outcome of the exercise. The safety departments and supervisors have also acknowledged their absolute pleasure in now being able to undertake the tasks for which they were employed, rather than being bound by necessary but unproductive induction activities.

Nicholas Flor
15th April 2009

For more information, visit www.smarthr.com.au

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