Challenge
In 2018, Nutrien was formed to become the largest vertically integrated agricultural input provider in the world. As with any merger, the technology and tools that support the formation and progress of the organization need to be aligned.
When Nutrien was formed, there was increased urgency to create an automated culture of safety, health and environment (SH&E). However, Nutrien faced a couple of key challenges. First, there are countless regulatory bodies with which a global provider like Nutrien must comply. It’s not just OSHA and the EPA in the United States, but rather regulatory bodies from local to county to the federal level in geographies around the world.
Second, getting the diverse workforce at Nutrien to buy into a shift from paper-based operations to an automated SH&E culture, amidst massive change across the organization, was a challenge. The company needed a solution that could address both challenges — one that would maximize visibility and guarantee timeliness of data to satisfy compliance audits, while also providing ease of use for a workforce with varying levels of comfort with technology that is spread out across the globe.
“We are regulatory bound in our vast business. We need to have things reported on time, in order to stay compliant. But it’s not just about compliance. We also need to make sure we’re getting insights into what our employees are seeing from an SH&E perspective. Doing all of this manually just wasn’t going to work long-term,” said Dustin Lammers, Senior Manager of Enterprise Applications supporting SH&E at Nutrien.
Solution
Nutrien chose Reliance for the SH&E technology platform to enable consistent processes (Incident Reporting and Investigations, Assessments and Corrective Actions) and timely data availability. One of the legacy companies, PotashCorp, had been using Octave Reliance (formerly ETQ Reliance) since 2009.
As part of the integration of the company, the SH&E department in partnership with IT performed a comprehensive review of SH&E platforms in the market and determined Reliance was the best solution to serve as the global SH&E platform across Nutrien.
A factor in the decision was the familiarity with Reliance, the platform’s flexibility and agility to implement the platform across Nutrien’s diverse business.
Over time, the lean core project team of IT & Safety, Health & Environmental personnel at Nutrien has worked to implement new aspects of Reliance. By the end of 2019, the solution had been rolled out across Nutrien’s global footprint. This includes all Nitrogen, Phosphate, Potash, Distribution Terminals and more than 1,500 Ag Retail locations across North America, South America and Australia.
Data collected through Reliance is the source for all SH&E reporting and has allowed the IT and SH&E teams to deliver robust reports that empower the organization — the teams get invaluable information and insight into trends and can act on that information to prevent serious injuries and fatalities (SIF).
Throughout 2019, the Nutrien IT team worked to automate documentation and analysis of incidents including injuries, spills, releases, hazard identification and other types of unplanned events. By getting the facilities to buy into a lightweight hazard identification document through Reliance, Nutrien is able to identify trends in housekeeping issues as well as potential slip, trip and fall hazards, helping the company become a proactive safety leader rather than reacting to incidents as they occur.
The next step of Nutrien’s Reliance implementation will revolve around continued development and use of Reliance’s mobile app for in-field data collection along with implementing life-critical assessments (assessments that have potentially life-altering or fatal risks). Add that to existing processes like safety meetings, fully integrated SH&E audits and assessments, exposure-based safety and inspections, and Nutrien has an ever-growing list of activities that can be taken care of on the centralized Reliance solution.
Even as the Reliance implementation continues to roll out, Nutrien has seen real improvements to the accuracy, consistency and efficiency of SH&E activities.
Results
Despite the many challenges of deploying a new SH&E system across a global business going through a major merger, Nutrien has been able to achieve valuable results from its Reliance implementations. The resulting benefits include:
Serious injury and fatality prevention
The data fed into Reliance helps predict trends in potential serious injury or fatality events. Nutrien has always made SIF prevention a key priority. And with the Reliance implementation, there was an expectation that those capabilities would improve. As more applications have rolled out, Nutrien has been able to use Reliance data as a leading indicator of where change is necessary across the organization. When there’s a near miss SIF event, the Reliance solution points to where corrective actions can be taken to close the safety gap.
This is a benefit that will compound over time. As more data is fed into Reliance, the insights generated will become more actionable, and that data will help Nutrien keep people safe across its business.
“We are regulatory bound in our vast business. We need to have things reported on time, in order to stay compliant. But it’s not just about compliance. We also need to make sure we’re getting insights into what our employees are seeing from an SH&E perspective. Doing all of this manually just wasn’t going to work long‑term," Dustin Lammers, Senior Manager of Enterprise Applications supporting SH&E at Nutrien
Commitment to safety culture
Nutrien knows that successfully executing SH&E activities requires more than just a new IT platform. It takes a real commitment to Nutrien’s safety principles and priorities: Principles
Do it safely or not at all
There is always time to do it safely
Care for each other’s safety and health
Priorities
Safety leadership
Hazard identification
Frequent and structured pauses
Serious injury and fatality prevention
Building a safety culture of commitment means getting everyone in the business to buy into these priorities — and having the right technology in place helps. For Nutrien, one of the biggest advantages to using Reliance as the foundation of a safety culture is its ease of use. Amidst the major shifts that came with the merger, its employees were already feeling change fatigue — and having them learn a complicated new solution wouldn’t have helped. Because Reliance is user-friendly, employees quickly bought into the new system, solidifying the safety culture beyond base level compliance with occupational health and safety bodies. Now, employees are talking more with their supervisors about safety, using Reliance to make sure that identifying and mitigating hazards is a team effort at every facility.
