Customer Story
Recycling
"I started out looking for a simple learning management solution. I was attracted to KPA Flex because it's capable of so much more."
Client Profile
Driving Sustainability in the Advanced Recycling Industry
Since 2009, Alterra Energy has been driven by passion and innovation, converting plastic destined for landfills into new materials through Advanced Recycling. The company’s process transforms previously non-usable plastics into valuable new synthetic crude oil. Alterra has more than doubled its staff in the past year and expects the growth trend to continue.
Challenge
Building EHS Programs for a Growing Company
Because Alterra is a small startup, the company didn’t have the established systems that a large, multinational player would. Angie Johnson is the EHS Manager at Alterra. For her and the team at Alterra, it was essential to establish a safety and compliance training program that could grow with the company.
“We’re ready to take our company to the next level, so we’re building programs that are tailored to our company.”
Based on previous experience, she knew the power of supporting and expanding her EHS programs with a comprehensive EHS software suite.
Solution
KPA Provides the Ultimate in Configurability
Johnson knew that the ability to configure her EHS software solution would be of paramount importance. She was also looking for an easy-to-use, modern interface.
However, as she began to review potential EHS software providers, she found that some didn’t quite deliver.
“‘Clunky’ is the best word to describe the other solution we were evaluating. For the user interface as well as the ability to customize inside the system,” Johnson said.
Once she explored the new options inside the KPA platform–and appreciated its intuitive and easy-to-use, modern interface–KPA became an easy choice.
“One of the biggest things that KPA has to offer is the ability to create a document management system for easy searchability.”
“We built our robust Management of Change (MOC) process as a form in KPA, which has different sub-reports, approval processes, and follow-ups,” stated Johnson. “The other system we demoed just did not have the functionality necessary for us to realize this project.”
Result
Making the Most of KPA Flex’s Broad Capability Set
“I’ve already customized and delivered training material that’s inside KPA,” said Johnson. “Next we’ll be assigning online training inside the system with a different topic every month.”
“Now I can track it all inside the software, so I don’t have to worry about anyone falling through the cracks where training is concerned.”
Training is just the beginning when it comes to how Alterra plans to leverage KPA Flex.
“The first thing we used inside KPA was the incident reporting. We do it for near misses which are great to have the ability to assign a follow-up so then we can prevent an injury from occurring,” explained Johnson.
“Down the road we may want to put our permits, like our hot work permits, safe work permits, and line breaking permits into the system,” said Johnson.
Now that Johnson has successfully implemented the capabilities she initially sought, she’s looking forward to gaining more mastery of the software’s capabilities.
“As far as clicking around and learning how to use the system, not to mention the amazing response time from KPA’s support team, things got up-to-speed super quickly.”
“That said, there are just so many configurable options that the sky’s the limit. I know there’s tons more value to discover.”
