Case Study

Understood the requirement, supplied the features others couldn’t — and cost less

NGTL 2021 System Expansion — Robb Section

Duty-based compliance, verified training delivery and anonymous workforce feedback on a 26-mile pipeline section in west-central Alberta

Sector: Federally regulated energy infrastructure  |  Engagement: March 2021 – December 2022  |  Role: Workforce compliance, training delivery and reporting platform

Key findings

• Compliance attaches to the duty, not the person — assign the work and its requirements come with it.
• Three products collapsed into one: workforce compliance, a learning management system and a survey tool.
• 100% completion on all 16 monthly safety meetings, with a record per person per meeting.
• Anonymous surveys riding on a module everyone completes — the response rate is the completion rate.
• Six of twenty-two months billed at standby rather than full rate, because the project had stopped.

Overview

The Robb Section is a 26-mile segment of the NGTL 2021 System Expansion in west-central Alberta. Tansi was engaged by the general contractor from March 2021 to December 2022, covering 400+ workers across 10+ contractor organizations, with an average of 250 people on site.

The general contractor went to market before it went to Tansi. It evaluated other vendors and found that none of them could supply the features the project actually required. Tansi could — and was also the lower-cost option, both to set up and to run.

That combination is the reason this engagement exists, and it is rarer than it sounds. The usual trade is capability against price: the vendor who can do it costs more, and the vendor you can afford cannot do it. Part of the answer here is that the project did not need one product, it needed three — workforce compliance, a learning management system and a survey tool — and Tansi was all three on one platform.

By the standards of the other projects in this series this is a small one, and that is the point of including it. A smaller project does not have a smaller compliance obligation; it has a smaller budget to meet it with.

What the engagement became was less a compliance system than the project’s channel to its own workforce. Every monthly safety meeting was delivered through it, with a verified record of who had watched, and roughly half carried a quiz or an anonymous survey.

Requirement one: requirements that belong to the job, not the person

Most workforce compliance systems track credentials against people. A worker holds tickets; somebody checks whether the right ones are current. That model works until you ask the question that actually matters on a construction site, which is not "what does this person hold" but "is this person allowed to do the thing they are about to do".

Tansi handles it the other way round. Requirements are attached to the duty. A duty can carry any number of them — safety tickets, orientations, licenses, competency assessments — and when that duty is assigned to a worker or a contractor, those requirements come with it. Compliance is then a property of the assignment, not a judgment somebody has to make separately.

The practical difference shows up when something changes. Move a laborer onto a water truck and the license requirement appears automatically; the person is not compliant for that duty until it is met. Add a requirement to a duty — a new orientation, a changed regulation — and it propagates to everyone holding that duty, without anyone rebuilding a list.

It is also what makes contractor management tractable. A contractor is not a set of names to be checked individually; it is a set of duties being performed, each carrying its own requirements.

Requirement two: the LMS became the project’s channel to its workforce

The general contractor started using the learning management system for site orientation, which is what it was there for. It ended up running the project’s entire communication with its workforce through it.

Monthly safety meetings, with a record

Every month the project was operating, it delivered its safety meeting through the LMS — the safety topic, project updates, statistics, and the material a crew would normally receive standing in a yard. Sixteen meetings were delivered over the engagement.

Two things changed as a result.

• There was a record. Not a sign-in sheet that may or may not reflect who was actually paying attention, but a completion record per person per meeting. If a regulator, an insurer or a lawyer asks who received a particular safety message, the answer exists.
• Completion reached 100%. Every worker completed every meeting. That was achieved through automated notifications and reminders, and because workers could complete it when it suited them rather than a crew being stood down to sit through it together.

The project owner spoke to the workforce directly

TC Energy hosted its own project updates through the same channel, via the general contractor. On most projects the owner’s message reaches the workforce third-hand if it reaches them at all. Here it arrived intact, and the owner could see that it had.

Quizzes and anonymous surveys

Roughly half the meetings carried a quiz or a survey. The quiz turns a completion record into a comprehension record, which is a materially different piece of evidence — it demonstrates the message was understood, not merely delivered.

The surveys were anonymous, and they were used for something most projects have no mechanism for at all: tracking morale, gathering feedback on how the project was running, and surfacing concerns and issues from the workforce before they became incidents or grievances.

Content the client wrote, and content Tansi produced

The general contractor built its own material in the LMS, which is how it should be — the people who know the project are the people who should be writing the safety content.

Where they wanted more than they had time or tooling to produce, they handed the content to Tansi. Tansi added automations, voiceover, formatting and publishing, and produced eight of the meetings for them. The client kept authorship; Tansi did production.

That production work was billed hourly and averaged around three hours per meeting video. It is worth stating the number, because it sets the expectation correctly: this is not a production contract with a five-figure minimum. It is a few hours of work, when the client wants it, on material the client already wrote.

Requirement three: onboarding and credentials, to the same standard

Workforce and contractor onboarding ran as it does on the larger projects in this series. Workers were onboarded once, oriented online before arriving, and their safety tickets tracked with the issuing provider, the course, the expiry date and a scan of the ticket itself.

• 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.
• Contractor organizations onboarded as entities, with their workers and duties attached.

The point worth drawing out is that none of this was reduced to suit a smaller project. A 26-mile section received the same onboarding, credential tracking and expiry management as a 10,600-worker federal megaproject, on a fraction of the budget.

Community participation reporting: not just how many

Headcount is the weakest possible measure of community participation, and it is the one most commonly reported. A contractor can state that it employed a given number of local or targeted-hire workers while every one of them was in an entry-level role, hired for a few weeks, and brought in from outside the region. The number is true and it describes almost nothing.

On this project Tansi tracked four dimensions, monthly, drawn from data already captured at onboarding rather than assembled separately at reporting time.

• How many, and their status. The count, and each worker’s current standing on the project.
• The quality of the employment. Whether the work was labor, equipment operation, supervisory or management. This is the dimension that separates genuine participation from a headcount, and the one most reporting leaves out.
• Home location relative to the project. So local and regional hiring could be distinguished from workers brought in from elsewhere — the difference between a project that employed people from a target group and one that employed the community it was built in.
• Monthly active status. Whether each worker was actually active on the project that month, which turns a point-in-time count into a picture of sustained engagement.

This project did not track participation against hours worked, as the Trans Mountain Expansion Project did. Monthly active status is a coarser measure of duration than hours, but it answers the same underlying question: whether people stayed, or whether the number was true for one month and hollow thereafter.

The commercial model: paying for a project that stops

Construction in Alberta stops for spring break-up. Frost comes out of the ground, roads and rights-of-way cannot carry equipment, and the project waits. Across this engagement the platform was not in active use for six of the twenty-two months.

Most software does not stop with it. The license renews, the invoice arrives, and a project that is not operating pays as though it were. Six months out of twenty-two is more than a quarter of the term paid for nothing.

Tansi charged a standby fee for those six months rather than the full rate. The system stayed live, the records stayed intact and available, and the project stopped paying to operate something it was not operating.

The contractor also found that the other vendors it evaluated could not supply the features the project required. Cheaper and less capable is a common combination. Cheaper and more capable is the one worth writing down.

Results at a glance

Why it worked: the requirement first, the price second

Robb is the smallest engagement in this series and the one that makes the clearest argument. A 26-mile section with 400 workers has the same regulatory obligations, the same duty of care and the same audit exposure as a project twenty times its size. What it does not have is a proportionally larger budget.

The usual outcome is that smaller operations get a lesser standard — spreadsheets, sign-in sheets, credential checks that happen when somebody remembers. Not because anyone chose that, but because the systems that do it properly are priced for the megaproject and sold with a setup cost to match.

What the contractor found when it went to market was the opposite of what it expected. The vendors it evaluated could not do what the project needed at any price. Tansi could, and asked for less. That is not a discount; it is what happens when the requirement is understood before the proposal is written, so nothing is being paid for that the project does not use.

The comparison was never like for like

There is a reason lower cost and greater capability were not in tension here. What this project needed was not one product. It was three: a workforce compliance system to hold credentials and site approval, a learning management system to deliver orientation and the monthly safety meetings, and a survey tool to run the anonymous feedback.

Buying that as three products means three procurements, three vendors, three sets of user accounts and three places the same worker exists — and no connection between any of them. The training record cannot make somebody compliant. The survey does not know who has completed the module it is attached to. Somebody reconciles it all by hand, or nobody does.

Tansi was one platform doing all three, which is why the arithmetic worked out the way it did. Against a single-purpose competitor it looked like more capability for less money. Against what the project actually required, it was three line items collapsed into one.

Tansi cost less to set up, less to run, and charged standby for the six months the project was not running. Same platform, same standard, sized to what the project actually was.

What this means for public sector organizations

Of the projects in this series, Robb is the one whose shape most public bodies will recognize: a modest budget, a workforce largely employed by somebody else, obligations that do not scale down, and a season when the work stops.

Credentials attached to roles, not people

The duty model is the capability with the widest public sector application. A school district does not really want to track that a particular person holds a passenger-endorsed commercial driver license, a background and criminal history check and a first aid certificate. It wants to assign someone to drive a bus and have the system know what that requires.

The same is true of a health system assigning a procedure, a city assigning confined space entry, or a public works department assigning a plow route. Define the role once with its requirements; assign it as often as you like. When a regulation changes, change the role and it propagates to everyone holding it.

Mandatory training you can actually evidence

Mandatory training is among the most audited obligations in the public sector, and among the worst evidenced. Attendance sheets prove somebody signed a page. A completion record proves a named person completed a named module on a named date, and a quiz result goes further and shows they understood it.

The 100% completion figure on this project is worth pausing on, because it was not achieved by making the training compulsory — it already was. It was achieved by automated reminders and by letting people complete it when it suited them instead of standing a crew down.

A channel for what staff will not say out loud

Anonymous survey responses attached to training people are already completing is an unusually reliable way to hear from a workforce. Standalone engagement surveys get the response rate of a standalone engagement survey. A survey riding on a module with 100% completion gets everybody.

For an organization responsible for people employed by contractors, agencies or partner bodies, this is often the only direct line to what is actually happening at the front line.

One system instead of three

Most public bodies run a learning management system, a separate HR or compliance system, and a separate survey or engagement tool — three contracts, three renewal dates, three security reviews, three sets of accounts to provision and deprovision, and the same person existing three times with no link between the records.

The cost of that is rarely counted honestly, because it is spread across three budget lines and several people’s time. On this project it was collapsed into one platform, which is most of the reason the numbers came out lower rather than higher.

Participation commitments that are actually measured

Public bodies attach local hire, community benefit, targeted hire and DBE and MBE utilization conditions to contracts constantly, and then measure compliance by headcount because headcount is what the reporting can produce. The result is a number that satisfies the clause and tells nobody whether the commitment was honored.

The four dimensions used on this project — count and status, the level of work being done, where people live relative to the site, and whether they were still there month to month — are the difference between a compliance figure and an answer. And because they came out of onboarding data the project was capturing anyway, producing them cost nothing extra.

Paying for a service you use seasonally

Public sector operations are frequently seasonal. Schools close for the summer. Parks, road maintenance and construction crews scale down for months. Wildfire and emergency staffing surge and collapse on a predictable cycle.

Most software licensing ignores this entirely, and organizations pay twelve months for eight months of use. Tansi charged standby through six months of shutdown on this project. It is a commercial arrangement rather than a feature, and for a seasonal operation it can be worth more than any capability on the 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

• 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.
• Coastal GasLink (CGL) — 4,500+ workers. Three remote camps unified on one record, integrated site access, bilingual delivery and five years of records moved out of a shipping container.
• 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.