Case Study

Brought in mid-project to unify three remote locations — and given the keys to the gate

Coastal GasLink Pipeline Project

Workforce compliance, competency of record, bilingual training delivery and integrated site access across 153 miles of northern British Columbia

Sector: Major energy infrastructure  |  Engagement: November 2018 – September 2020  |  Role: Compliance, training, competency and site access platform

Sector: Major energy infrastructure | Engagement: November 2018 – September 2020 | Role: Compliance, training, competency and site access platform

Key findings

• Two platforms had already failed here — on capability, on conformance, and on integration with the security system.
• The project was compliant within 30 days of Tansi being implemented.
• More than $500,000 in trainer and camp accommodation cost avoided.
• Site access across three remote camps was granted from the compliance record itself.
• Five years of safety records moved out of a sea can and rented storage into searchable storage.

Overview

Coastal GasLink is a 416-mile natural gas pipeline running from Dawson Creek to the LNG Canada export facility near Kitimat, British Columbia. Tansi was engaged by the general contractor delivering spreads 5, 6 and 7 — 153 miles, more than a third of the route and the largest single portion of the project.

Tansi was not there at the start. The general contractor was months into the project when it engaged Tansi in November 2018, and it did so because coordination across three separated locations had become the problem. Camps, equipment yards, a warehouse and office complexes were spread roughly 75 miles apart in northern British Columbia. Each location knew what was happening at that location. No one had a reliable view across all three.

Two systems had already been tried and had failed. The engagement ran to September 2020 and covered 4,500+ workers.

The project was compliant within 30 days of Tansi being implemented.

Requirement one: one platform across three separated locations

Three camps 75 miles apart, each with its own yards, warehouse and offices, is not one site with three addresses. Without a shared record it behaves like three projects that happen to share a client — three sets of worker records, three interpretations of who was approved, three answers to the same question.

That was the condition the contractor engaged Tansi to fix. The requirement was not a feature list. It was a single authoritative record that every location worked from, reflecting reality at all three within the working day rather than at the next reconciliation.

Two systems had already failed

Tansi was the third platform on this project. Two had been implemented before it and neither survived contact with the work. Three things went wrong, and they are worth separating because they are different failures.

• They could not do what was asked. The requirement was stated up front and the capability was not there. This is the failure that is discovered fastest and costs the least, because it becomes obvious early.
• They would not conform to the project. Each expected the project to adopt its model of how work is organized. On a live construction project across three remote locations, months in, changing how the work is done to suit the software is not a trade anyone can afford to make.
• They could not integrate with the project’s other systems. Including the security system governing access to the camps. A compliance platform that cannot talk to the system at the gate leaves the most consequential decision on the project — who gets in — disconnected from the record that should determine it.

That third failure is the one that shaped this engagement. It is why Tansi ended up supplying and integrating the security system itself rather than reporting alongside it.

Tansi took the opposite position from its predecessors: configure to the project as it stood, integrate with what was already there, and build what was missing while the project was running.

Requirement two: the whole worker record in one place

Every worker on the project needed to be oriented, ticketed and — for many roles — formally assessed as competent. On a multi-employer project those three records typically live in three different places, owned by three different parties.

Orientation delivered online, before arrival

All 4,500+ workers were oriented through the Tansi learning management system, completed before they traveled to site.

Workers were still paid for their orientation time — that cost did not go away, and this case study does not claim it did. What went away was the trainer. Delivering orientation in person on a remote project means keeping a trainer on site: their day rate, and their camp accommodation, six days a week, for as long as workers keep arriving.

Safety tickets, verified rather than declared

Tansi tracked the issuing training provider, the course name, the expiry date and a scan of the ticket itself for every worker.

• Automated notification to the worker at 90, 60 and 30 days before expiry, and on expiry.
• Parallel notification to the organization, so a lapse was visible to more than the individual.
• Forward-looking expiry reporting used to plan training ahead of need.

Contractor compliance management

Workforce management on a project like this is not only about individual workers. Tansi managed the contractor organizations themselves — their safety programs, the workers they brought to site, and the compliance status of both.

• Contractor organizations tracked as entities, with their safety programs held and reviewed in Tansi.
• Each contractor’s workers linked to that organization, so a contractor’s compliance position could be seen as a whole rather than reconstructed worker by worker.
• Safety tickets, expiry notifications and site approval applied consistently across every organization on the project, not only the general contractor’s own workforce.

This is what made the 30-day figure achievable. Bringing 4,500+ workers into compliance one at a time is a year of administration. Bringing their employers into compliance, with their workers attached, is a month.

“The hard part of a project like this isn’t your own workforce — it’s everyone else’s. Tansi understood that, and built to how the project actually ran instead of asking us to run it their way. The same verifications and the same site approval applied to every organization on site. ‘How compliant are we?’ stopped being a question I had to ask anyone.”

— Corporate Safety Manager, CGL general contractor

Onboarding, payroll documentation and HR

The worker record did not stop at safety. Tansi carried the onboarding and payroll documentation as well — tax forms, policy reviews and acknowledgements, and the payroll information collected at onboarding. HR worked from Tansi for that documentation rather than running a parallel process alongside the compliance system.

The practical effect is that a worker was onboarded once. Orientation, credentials, competency, policy acknowledgements and payroll paperwork were one sequence producing one record, instead of the same person being set up three times by three departments who then had to reconcile.

It also raises the stakes on where that record lives. Tax documentation and payroll information are personal information of a sensitivity comparable to health data, and they carry the same residency and privacy obligations — which is why the data residency question in the About section is not a technicality.

Tansi as the system of record for competency

Competency assessments were held in Tansi. This is worth stating plainly, because it is the difference between a record that exists and a record that can be reached. When competency lives in a head-office system, proving that an operator is cleared for a task becomes an administrative request. When it lives alongside the worker’s orientation, tickets and site approval, the supervisor responsible for the work can see it.

One record per worker held orientation, tickets, competency assessments and site approval together — and, because of the access integration described below, that record also determined whether the worker could get through the gate.

Requirement three: site access that enforces compliance

Most compliance systems report. Somebody still has to act on the report. The gap between the two is where unqualified people end up on site — not through negligence, but because the person at the gate has no way to know what the compliance system knows.

On Coastal GasLink, Tansi closed that gap. Tansi supplied and integrated a security system covering all three remote workforce camps together with their equipment yards, office complexes and the warehouse. Worker access was granted through Tansi.

And when someone leaves

Access control is only as good as its worst day, and the worst day is the one someone leaves. When a worker was removed from the project or left it, the worker profile was updated with HR and access was removed from the security system — one action, not two departments hoping the other remembered.

This is the mirror of the single onboarding described above, and it is the half that organizations more often get wrong. A person who has left with working credentials is a security problem that nobody is looking for, because the record that would reveal it is the one nobody updated.

For a project running three camps 75 miles apart, this mattered more than it would on a single site. There was no possibility of one person knowing everyone by sight at three locations. The gate had to know, and the gate had to be reading from the same record as everyone else.

Requirement four: a workforce that did not all work in English

The general contractor was an Italian company, and roughly fifty of the people on the project worked in Italian.

Fifty out of more than four and a half thousand is around one percent of the workforce. That is the point. Safety comprehension does not scale with headcount — a worker who cannot read the orientation is not oriented, and the consequence of that on a pipeline spread is identical whether they are one of fifty or one of five thousand. Delivering the material only in English would have meant fifty people holding a certificate for training they had not actually received.

Tansi accommodated this on both sides of the platform:

• Orientation in Italian. Site orientation was delivered through the learning management system in Italian as well as English, so workers were oriented in the language they actually work in.
• The platform itself in Italian. Translating the training while leaving the system in English would have solved half the problem. The people using Tansi day to day needed it in their own language too.

This was not a feature on a roadmap. It was a project requirement discovered in the course of the work and built into the platform during the engagement — for around fifty people. It is worth asking how many vendors would localize a platform for one percent of a workforce, and what the two systems that failed here would have said if asked.

Requirement five: reporting the project could act on

Project safety KPIs

Tansi tracked the project’s safety key performance indicators and reported them daily, giving management a current picture across all three spreads rather than three separate reports assembled at different times to different definitions.

Daily is the part that matters. A safety KPI reported monthly describes a period that has already closed; reported daily it is something a supervisor can act on while the shift is still running. The project passed its audits over the course of the engagement, with the reporting produced continuously rather than assembled in advance of each one.

Community participation and workforce demographic reporting

As on the Trans Mountain Expansion Project, Tansi produced community participation and workforce demographic reporting for the project — participation across the workforce, and the reporting needed to evidence it.

This is the reporting category most often assembled by hand at the end of a quarter from sources that do not agree. Because the underlying data was already in Tansi as a by-product of onboarding, orientation and site access, the reporting was a view of the record rather than a separate exercise.

Subcontractor daily work reports

Subcontractors submitted daily work reports through Tansi. Because those reports sat alongside verified site access and attendance, the project had an independent record of who was actually present, at which location, on any given day — the same mechanism that has been used elsewhere to reconcile subcontractor invoicing.

Requirement six: records that had to outlive the project

Project safety documentation on Coastal GasLink carried a retention obligation of up to five years, arising both from regulation and from the general contractor’s own records policy. Before Tansi, it was kept as paper, in boxes, in a sea can on site — and in rented storage, which the contractor was paying for.

That arrangement satisfies the letter of a retention requirement and almost none of its purpose. A retention obligation exists so that a document can be produced when someone asks for it — an auditor, a regulator, an insurer, a lawyer, a family. Boxes in a steel container answer none of those requests in any useful timeframe.

The general contractor scanned project safety documentation into Tansi document storage. Records were filed systematically rather than chronologically into whatever box was open, held under the same access controls as the rest of the worker record, and retrievable by search instead of by expedition. The rented storage was no longer needed.

The obligation then survives the thing that usually defeats it. When the camps closed and the yards were cleared, the records did not depend on anyone remembering which container they were in.

Results at a glance

How it was delivered: someone from Tansi was on site

Most of what this case study describes would not have happened at the pace it happened if Tansi had been delivered the way software usually is — configured remotely, handed over with training material, and supported by ticket.

The general contractor engaged a Tansi team member to work on site. Not as a sales presence, and not for a launch week. The role covered the practical work that determines whether a system is adopted or merely installed:

• Scanning the records. Working alongside the contractor’s people to get five years of paper documentation into the system and filed properly, rather than leaving a backlog that never gets touched.
• Installing the security system. The access integration across three camps was physical work at three remote locations, not a configuration setting.
• Training people where they work. Supervisors, administrators and HR staff trained in their own environment on their own data, which is the difference between people who have been shown a system and people who use it.
• Finding what else could be streamlined. Being on site meant seeing the workarounds nobody thinks to mention in a requirements meeting. Moving tax forms into Tansi came out of that — a process improvement nobody had asked for, identified by someone who was there to watch how the work actually happened.

This is the mechanism behind the 30-day compliance result and behind the scope growth over the engagement. Requirements did not surface through a change-request process; they surfaced because somebody from the vendor was standing in the yard.

Why it worked: the platform conformed, not the project

Coastal GasLink is the clearest demonstration of the argument Tansi makes, because Tansi arrived second. The project was already running. Its ways of working were already set. Three locations had already developed their own habits. Any platform arriving at that point either fits what exists or forces a change that the project has no capacity to absorb.

Two platforms had already tried and failed. They asked the project to conform to them, and could not reach the systems the project already depended on. Tansi did the reverse — and then kept doing it, adding integrated site access, payroll and HR documentation, and Italian-language delivery during the engagement as the requirements surfaced.

That is the practical meaning of a modular, configurable platform. Not that it can do everything on day one, but that the gap between a requirement appearing and the requirement being met is measured in weeks rather than release cycles.

The 30-day compliance result is the evidence. A platform that has to be bent into shape does not deliver that on a project already in motion — and neither does one delivered entirely from a distance.

What this means for public sector organizations

A pipeline spread and a public service delivery network have more in common than they appear to. Both are distributed across locations that are far apart, staffed largely by people the accountable organization does not directly employ, and governed by credentials that expire.

Distributed operations with distance between them

A county health system, a rural school district, a public works department or a utility runs facilities that are hours apart. Each site knows its own situation. The organization as a whole often does not, and discovers the gap during an audit or an incident. The mechanism that solved this on Coastal GasLink — one worker record every location reads from and writes to — transfers directly, and does not require the locations to change how they operate.

Access control that reflects compliance

This is the capability most public sector organizations assume they have. A contractor whose background check has expired should not be able to badge into a school. A technician whose certification has lapsed should not be able to enter a treatment plant. In most organizations the credential system and the door system are separate, and the gap between them is closed by someone remembering to update a list.

Tansi governed physical access from the compliance record on Coastal GasLink, across three remote camps. The same integration applies to any facility where the question at the door is really a question about qualification.

Service delivery in more than one language

United States public bodies receiving federal funding carry language access obligations under Title VI, and many serve communities where a material share of residents and staff work in a language other than English. Training and compliance material is exactly the category where translation is most often deferred and least defensible to defer.

Tansi delivered orientation and the platform interface in Italian on this project because the workforce required it. The capability is the same one a bilingual public body needs.

One onboarding instead of three

In most public bodies a new contractor, volunteer or temporary employee is set up separately by HR, by payroll and by whoever owns safety or security — three intake processes collecting overlapping information into systems that do not talk. The duplication is visible to the person being onboarded, which is its own problem when the organization is competing for staff.

On Coastal GasLink that was one sequence producing one record: credentials, policy acknowledgements, payroll documentation and site access together. The obligations differ in a school district or a health system; the structure does not.

Records you have to keep, and be able to produce

Every public body operates under retention schedules, and most also face access to information requests, litigation holds and audits that turn a retention obligation into a retrieval obligation with a deadline attached. The two are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where organizations get into difficulty.

Paper in boxes satisfies retention and fails retrieval. A request that should take an afternoon takes three weeks, and nobody can say with confidence whether the file is complete or whether something went missing during an office move. Coastal GasLink had that problem in a shipping container on a remote construction site; a school district has it in a basement, and a health system has it in a storage unit. The fix is the same — capture the document into the same system that holds everything else about that person or that job, filed systematically at the point it is created rather than sorted later.

Implementations fail for reasons that have nothing to do with software

Public sector technology projects rarely fail because the product could not do the job. They fail because the backlog was never migrated, because the people who had to use it were trained once by video, because the physical work at each site was somebody else’s problem, and because the vendor was reachable only through a portal by the time the difficulties appeared.

On Coastal GasLink a Tansi team member was on site doing exactly that work — the scanning backlog, the hardware installation, the training in context, and the process improvements that only become visible when you watch people work. Any organization that has lived through a system that was installed but never adopted will recognize why that mattered more than any feature.

Replacing a system without re-procuring

Tansi came into Coastal GasLink after the project had started, alongside what was already in place, and grew into the role. Public bodies rarely get to choose their systems at a convenient moment either. The ability to add a platform to a running operation, configure it to how the organization actually works, and extend it as obligations change is worth more in practice than a longer feature list.

About Tansi

Tansi is the operational layer traditional ERP systems were never built to cover. Built continuously since 2015, it is a single system for the work that happens between corporate reporting and the field: assets and inventory, workforce and contractor management, training and scheduling, digital forms and inspections, mass communications, and compliance reporting. Designed for public sector operations, Tansi has managed 15,600+ workers across three concurrent major infrastructure programs.

Organizations deploy the full platform or individual modules alongside an ERP they already own — in days, not quarters. Support is handled entirely in-house. Calls are answered by a live person in the United States and go directly to the people who build and maintain the platform, so a request reaches someone who can act on it rather than a ticket queue.

Tansi LLC is US-incorporated. Client data and backups are held in US data centers, Tansi has completed a SOC 2 Type II audit, and the platform supports HIPAA, FERPA and state data-handling requirements.

Related engagements

Coastal GasLink ran concurrently with two other major programs on the same platform.

• Trans Mountain Expansion Project (TMEP) — 10,600+ workers. Workforce compliance, health data with verified in-country residency, field-verified competency, emergency mass notification and workforce participation reporting across 118 miles of Rocky Mountain corridor.
• NOVA Gas Transmission Ltd. (NGTL) — 400+ workers. Workforce compliance, orientation delivery and contractor management on natural gas transmission expansion.
• Government-funded non-profit health authority. Asset and inventory management for medical supplies across a distributed health service network.
• Alberta Avenue Business Association. Interactive business registry with member profiles, promotional offers, customer engagement tracking and a mobile application.