More than Just OQ: How a Large Contractor Incorporates the EWN Platform into Their Safety Culture (Case Study)

The dynamic and highly regulated nature of the energy industry means that keeping a large workforce compliant with safety standards and operator qualifications can be challenging. MP Technologies, a leading player in the energy sector, is one such company that faced this challenge. 

With nearly 1,000 employees across multiple states and sectors and being connected to several large operators, MP Technologies needed more than a records manager. They needed a single tool that let them seamlessly create and deploy online training and easily track and report on the statuses of their many employees. 
They found what they were looking for with Energy Worldnet (EWN). 

Since first partnering with EWN in 2017, MP Technologies has found new and innovative ways that the EWN platform fits into their company safety culture. Now, it’s become a critical component of how they track their operator qualification records and deliver safety training to their employees across the country. 

“The EWN platform is our main database for all of our qualification and safety training,” said Ward Westphal, the Training, Compliance, and Damage Prevention Manager of MP Technologies. 

From creating safety training to tracking certifications with eCards, MP Technologies has discovered how integrating the EWN platform throughout their organization can simplify compliance management.

Flexing the Evaluation Authoring Tool 

Despite working with other compliance management providers in the past, MP Technologies wasn’t satisfied with their ability to quickly create and assign safety training to their workers. Other platforms required them to send training to the provider, forcing them to wait for the provider to upload the training. But with the Evaluation Authoring tool provided with the EWN platform, MP Technologies uploads, edits, and publishes training on their schedule. 

“Most of our training is developed in-house, and a good percentage of them are material that I’ve developed myself,” said Ward. 

“The way we can add courses to the EWN system and pull them out ourselves is really quite good,” said Ward. “I can just upload the course, see if it works, pull it out, and fix it—it’s so much quicker than what we’ve used in the past.” 

Since they first started using EWN’s Evaluation Authoring tool, MP Technologies has been busy creating and assigning more than 250 OQ and safety courses customized to the various states and regions they work in. And they’ve seen the benefits.

“Ever since COVID, we’ve used the EWN platform for the whole company for all of our onboarding and annual safety training,” Ward said. “In fact, last year, we offered our employees the option to either come in to take their annual safety training live or do it 100% online through EWN. We found that most of them elected to do it online. So, this year we’re going back to 100% online safety training.”

Through EWN, MP Technologies can quickly respond to training needs, improving their efficiency and increasing overall employee satisfaction. What’s more, they can be confident that any training they upload is automatically tracked through EWN’s reporting features. 

“The online trainings also feed right into the recordkeeping, so we can just add new trainings as we need them and be confident that the tracking is immediate.”

Making Workplace Credentials Accessible

With so many employees across the country and so many OQ and safety training modules, automatic reporting functionalities are critical for MP Technologies. For Ward—who manages the training for employees across the Midwest, Texas, Montana, and California—it’s important to know, in real time, who has and hasn’t completed their training.

Fortunately, the EWN platform makes it easy to access workplace credentials through its robust reporting features.

“The recordkeeping side of the EWN platform is really what our company sees as the biggest value,” Ward said. “We can download standardized reports for everybody, whether they’re taking OQ or safety training. And if we need information about an employee or there’s an incident, we can run the reports to show they are trained. Without EWN, we wouldn’t be able to pull that off.”  

With the EWN platform, MP Technologies can view and export information whenever they need to and rest easy knowing it’s accurate and up to date. Administrators can see a high-level overview of their employees using the Executive Dashboard or drill deeper into the activities, qualifications, and completion rates of their individual employees using the Status and Activity reports. 

EWN—A Full Safety Management Platform 

Like many companies, MP Technologies faced a common problem: Not only did they need a platform to house their OQ records, but also one that could deliver their safety training and evaluations. On top of that, the problem for MP Technologies was heightened since only 120 of their 1,000 employees required OQ—the remainder needed annual safety training to cover topics from ladder safety to defensive driving.

But rather than juggle between two different platforms, they found that they could successfully leverage the EWN platform to meet all of their training and evaluation needs.

“We can document our safety training and evaluations right in EWN just like we do for our OQ evaluations,” Ward said. “So, the trainers and evaluators for our safety material can go in and complete their assignments as if they were one of our OQ evaluators.”

MP Technologies found that the EWN platform could be a single source for both OQ and safety training, and that its Evaluation Authoring and reporting features could work together seamlessly as a key part of the company’s safety management program. Instead of pulling multiple reports and training on multiple platforms, they could lean on the EWN platform. 

“Our people are really impressed with how it all works together.”