Intactix Systems, a partner of Shirley Parsons, helped a leading bulk carrier organisation transform its safety culture, performance, operational efficiency and positively impact business growth.
Intactix Systems, a partner of Shirley Parsons, helped a leading bulk carrier organisation transform its safety culture, performance, operational efficiency and positively impact business growth.
Trimac Transportation is a leading North American bulk carrier with a 75-year legacy of service excellence. Despite receiving numerous accolades and certifications for safety, including a TRIR score of 0.93, Responsible Care® certification, several safety awards, and a with a perception of a strong safety culture an unexpected ‘massive explosion at one of their facilities revealed significant gaps in their safety systems and culture.
This event, which fortunately resulted in no serious injuries, prompted Trimac to re-evaluate its approach to safety, realising that their reliance on traditional ‘leading and lagging’ metrics and accolades had left them vulnerable to unseen risks.
To improve their safety and operational practices, Trimac engaged Intactix Systems to embark on an innovative science based program focusing on the few vital tactics that create and sustain high reliability organisation performance. The process began with a culture and risk evaluation of the entire business that identified critical socio-technical shortcomings, resulting in a low safety culture maturity (13.9%). Intactix introduced new performance measures and the ‘skills needed to win’ system, focusing on education, coaching to positively change the delta with the baseline scores
Trimac also implemented CARE software, enabling real-time monitoring of safety culture and performance metrics. The software provided transparency, accountability, and actionable insights into serious incident precursors, helping leadership address issues proactively. Importantly, the monitoring motivated the few vital behaviours across the organisation that collectively creates a high performing safety culture.
The transformation emphasized practical, on-the-ground tactics to foster safe behaviours, even among Trimac’s decentralised and often unsupervised workforce.
The transformation led to significant improvements across Trimac’s operations, including:
Safety performance: A 29% reduction in Department of Transportation accident frequency, a 63% decrease in lost-time injury frequency, and a 30% drop in regulatory violations. Further They recently underwent a Royal Dutch Shell safety audit with the lead auditor stating: “Trimac has the best carrier safety program he has ever evaluated.”
Culture maturity: The culture maturity score improved by a factor of 5 from 13.9% to 70.4%, reducing high-consequence potential incidents from nearly three per week to one every 2- months. A truly remarkable transformation.
Operational excellence: Cost savings included a $12.3 million (20%) reduction in safety-related expenses and minimized insurance premium increases, even as industry rates surged.
Business growth: Improved safety performance secured the largest customer contract in Trimac’s history, positioning the company as an industry leader in operational reliability.
Through the partnership with Intactix, Trimac has not only improved safety outcomes but also demonstrated that robust safety practices can drive better operational and financial performance, reinforcing their commitment to being a learning organisation.
Willian J. Marchbank, Chief Operating Officer at Trimac said:
“Our performance results stemming from the Intactix methodology have been transformative to our entire business, with direct improvements in job procedures, work conditions, employee engagement and empowerment and overall efficiencies. Thank you to Intactix for taking us on this journey, providing the roadmap and the GPS coordinates to High Reliability Organization success.”
To find out more about how Shirley Parsons and Intactix could help your organisation’s performance and safety culture, get in touch below.
