Customer Profile: Montana Rockworks

Montana Rockworks is one of the largest suppliers of thin veneer, architectural and landscape stone in the US. The company quarries stone in the Montana Rockies and then ships to distributors from around the U.S. and Canada.

The Challenge – Complex Compliance Training at Multiple Sites

With 370-375 employees spread across 5-8 sites, Montana Rockworks struggled to keep all their safety and compliance training up-to date. The nature of Montana Rockworks’ industry makes them subject to both MSHA and OSHA safety regulations, creating complex training requirements for individual employees dependent on their job roles and locations.

Given the complex nature of the training requirements they faced, Montana Rockworks knew they needed a computerized system to manage everything.

“Essentially, if you’re training on both the MSHA and the OSHA curriculum you’re running a little training school inside your business,” explains Cyndee Carter, Montana Rockworks’ HR Director. “You’re required to create training programs for all your individual employees and then to be able to produce reports on that in a timely fashion — it’s crazy to try to manage that by hand.”

The Solution – Convergence LMS With OSHA and MSHA Training Content

After evaluating a number of options, Montana Rockworks decided on Convergence. In part because they could take advantage of Convergence’s built-in MSHA and OSHA training content to jumpstart their new training program.

“This is our first year where we have computer training as opposed to only lectures, or classroom training,” says Carter. “It’s been really a nice change for us. We have little learning stations where employees can go and take their training, and the Convergence courses are very much in-line with what we’re trying to achieve. There are company-specific things we need to supplement with, but other than that they’re pretty straightforward and give us what we need to help meet MSHA and OSHA training requirements.

Most pressing, though, was the need to be able to understand the compliance status of each of Montana Rockwork’s 375 employees, and to be able to report that data at a moment’s notice.

“We needed everyone in each role to get the same training,” says Carter. “For employees in the quarries, for instance, even if they’d done their task training it would be a ticketable item if we couldn’t prove that they’d done it.

“Before, we’d train people, but they weren’t all getting the same exact training, and we struggled to maintain accurate records of everything. Especially if an inspector demanded to see training data ‘right now’, it was hard to pull together. With Convergence, all the training, all the training data is in one place and in one format and we can track on-the-job, impromptu training just as easily as we can the computer-based courses. It’s really nice.”

The Outcome – Compliant Training and Accurate Reporting

One of the key reasons Montana Rockworks went with the Convergence system was the ability to create accurate training records and to quickly and easily report on training. And that’s worked out as planned, helping Montana Rockworks comply with unexpected requests from regulators.

“From a compliance aspect, it’s been huge,” says Carter. “We had an inspector who tried to make us run monthly training, which meant he would come in and try to take a driver and say ‘print me your training records from June to June.’ And to be able to accommodate an inspector, to say ‘fine, we’ll print it from June to June’—it really makes it look like we know what we’re doing. That we can prove our training data when asked immediately is a great thing for us.

“Now we know our reports are correct. That is awesome because when we run those for MSHA certification, the activities have to be under their topics or it disallows the training records. Now, it’s awesome. We print them, we get them out there, we get them primed, and have that backup data. It’s been great.”

Carter says using Convergence to organize their training program has also helped Montana Rockworks to build a shared vision of their compliance training requirements.

“Setting all the training up in the Convergence LMS provides us with a visual that you can use to train other employees around you and feed the vision of what OSHA and MSHA is requiring,” she says. “It really helps in communicating that vision to other managers as well.”