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Recycle America Alliance, a subsidiary
of Waste Management, Inc., is the largest
collector of recycled materials from
businesses and households across North
America. With more than 3,000 employees
and the largest network of recycling
centers in the United States, the organization
operates 160 material recovery facilities
that process over 5 million tons of
recyclable commodities each year. Safety
and Compliance Manager Tom Elms is responsible
for assisting plant managers in the
Midwestern region to ensure the health
and safety of both employees and the
facilities where they work. The nature
of the business entails a variety of
OSHA, EPA and DOT regulatory requirements,
as well as extensive training demands
from both external and internal sources. |
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The biggest challenges facing Elms’
group have to do with busy operations
people who are largely focused on efficiency
and production. “Our plant
managers are dealing with an enormous
array of issues on a daily basis,”
says Elms, “and compliance
is just one of many tasks for them.
And it’s one whose terminology,
requirements and metrics may be unfamiliar.
So the easier we can make it, the more
confident we can be that all of our
requirements are being addressed.”
The organization is committed to
a proactive approach to safety and health
issues through extensive training, and
so tracking and forecasting training
needs has been the major focus of Elms’
efforts. |
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Recycle America Alliance saw the potential
value in an accurate and reliable method
to track training compliance, and selected
TrueNorth for the job. Today, the performance
of TrueNorth’s Navigator system
has justified the company’s decision.
Each site routinely faxes in the applicable
data—facility inspections, audiograms,
training courses completed, meeting
records, employee/worker observations
— directly to TrueNorth. The company
then verifies the information and enters
it into its database. Compliance information
is updated continuously, and is available
on demand over the Internet to company
managers. Elms, “The simplicity
of TrueNorth’s solution reduced
the whole process to a manageable routine
for our operations people.” |
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Today, the system is helping
Recycle America Alliance maintain
its aggressive approach to managing
health and safety issues. “Just
the fact that these requirements are
being tracked enables us to look ahead
and plan our training programs far
more effectively,” says
Elms. “Probably the biggest
advantage is that our plant managers
and their staffs don’t have
to collect and continually update
training records for each individual.
They just fax in each piece of documentation
as the event occurs, and we get the
data back from TrueNorth in a way
that lets us analyze it at any scale
we want, from the individual to the
district to the entire region. Tracking
our progress toward meeting our goals
and planning our future efforts have
become a whole lot easier.”
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TrueNorth’s
Navigator online service enables organizations
to capture, record and report safety, health,
training and environmental data for more
effective management of compliance efforts.
For more information, call 713.466.0829.
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