Background
Established in 1965, Bulkmatic Transport Company is the largest dry bulk carrier in the United States. The company has operations in all 48 continuous states, Canada, Mexico and Europe. Facilities consist of thirty-nine (39) terminals, twenty-two (22) tank washes, and fifty-five (55) rail-to-truck loading operations.
The Problem
Due to the nature of work, employees are required to be provided with a complicated array of training classes, vehicle operations licenses, and permits, all of which expire on a periodic basis. As a result, the company was having difficulty tracking what items were required for each employee, when was it provided and when it expired.
The company sends its own crew of trainers from facility to facility to provide much of the training and the traveling trainers wanted a better planning tool to decide when training trips were necessary and what courses needed to be provided.
The Solution
The company implemented the SMART 7.0 Training Management Module to track all employee training, licenses and permits. They also implemented the Employee Health and Safety Module to manage records and renewals for respirator fit testing, medical exams, drug testing, and pulmonary function tests for specific individuals.
The company was able to get their SMART system up and running and fully populated in a matter of hours. First, they imported the list of facilities into the system. Then they entered all individual training classes. Classifications were created which grouped sets of requirements together for employees having a defined set of job responsibilities. Finally, they imported the list of employees from the company’s HR management system. During this import, each employee was assigned to one of the job classifications.
With SMART, the Training Manager is able to easily see what training and licensing is missing or expired for each employee. Training status reports are generated on a regular basis so the Training Manager can schedule required training for staff before the expiration date. The system is also used to provide a resource to the training teams so they can develop attendance lists for each class as they move from facility to facility.
When a work activity at a site calls for staff with special training requirements, the Training Manager can easily search the database to find all staff members meeting those requirements. The data is regularly exported from SMART for limited publication on the company’s Intranet system in a read-only format. Regular updates from the enterprise HR database are imported to add new employees to the Training Manager Module.
The SMART System saves the firm thousands of dollars each year and helps them ensure they are in compliance with all of their training, certification, licensing and permit, as well as, employee health and safety requirements.
