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EnviroMail 38 Canada - Subcontractor Safety Performance Reporting and Positive Performance Indicators
Safety - An ALS Core Value
Many companies have a very high focus on safety management and protection of their staff, visitors, and the community. In the Oil & Gas, Water, and Mining sectors this focus can be even greater, due to elevated risk profiles involving fire, underground mining, heavy equipment, and working around water, sometimes in flood events.
As a laboratory provider we also have risks with many chemicals including flammable solvents, acids and toxic substances, significant heat sources, plus glassware and moving many hundreds of tonnes of samples annually.
ALS globally maintains being ‘Safe’ as a company core value. This puts safety first as our most important priority in everything we do to. This is in the forefront of decisions to ensure the protection of staff, clients, and our stakeholder community. At the next level within ALS, the Canadian Environmental division has five key pillars in our strategic plan that drive operational focus and best practice, underpinning our culture and focus. The first of these follows:
“Quality and Safety compliance leadership with proactive industry solutions”
Looking at this Divisional Pillar, it can be split into two key areas – firstly the things we do internally at ALS to keep our people safe, and secondly the changes we strive to bring to market to help make our customers safer. The first of these is tracked internally via an ALS Positive Performance Indicator Scorecard – which sits globally across every ALS business in every ALS division in every country.
Positive Performance Indicator System (PPI)
ALS implemented a PPI system globally many years ago. This tracks not only the traditional lag indicators of LTIFR, TRIFR, and SLTIFR, but also the lead indicators of a good safety culture, including program development, risk management, training, and leadership. This produces a scorecard for each site/business, which resets at zero each year in April. The scorecard measures performance, and as targets are achieved and maintained the score typically increases towards the ALS financial year end (March 31).
This program has a targeted maximum of 100 points but allows strong safety performance to be recognized via out-performance ratings, allowing a maximum possible collective score of 150. ALS Canada has delivered a very strong safety result again this year, with a combined total of 146.8 out of a maximum 150. This was the highest of any ALS Life Sciences Division globally and is a credit to the local safety/management team, our staff, and our customers. Pleasingly we were LTI free for another 1.29 million hours worked, and we achieved perfect scores on our Training and Leadership & Culture metrics. The ALS Canada scorecard follows with metric categories listed adjacent.
What does this mean for ALS Customers?
Knowing that your laboratory provider is focused heavily on safety is important if that aligns with your organizational culture. However, as a customer you do not spend as much time in our laboratory, so what should our customers see when dealing with ALS? We would expect you to see us proactively talk about safety, share what we have learned, constantly strive to innovate on safety, and have a strong focus on helping your team be safer in the field when sampling.
Several years ago, we identified manual handling as a high risk for our customers (and laboratory staff). As a result, ALS has miniaturized many tests in Canada and moved to smaller coolers to reduce risk of sprains and strains. This has successfully reduced strain incidents significantly in Canada, removing hundreds of tonnes of samples annually that our clients lugged around the field. Moving forward we will continue to work diligently to benefit our customers, courier drivers, and staff in this area with new leading miniaturized capabilities soon to be released. We hope that our customers are also seeing this continued reduction in incidents, and we thank you for supporting our efforts to reduce bottle and cooler size.
As a company, ALS has recently achieved our strongest ever performance on LTIFR safety statistics, outperforming our big three global peers that currently report safety data. Figure 3 adjacent shows the overall ALS performance relative to major peers with ALS results in yellow (*LTIFR rate for ALS as at 31 March 2022 compared to major peers as at 31 December 2021).
For further information please contact your local ALS Management team. We look forward to continuing the safety improvement journey with you and updating you next year.
