Case Study

How a $30.9 billion national pipeline project cut 56,000 paid orientation hours and passed every audit from month two

Trans Mountain Expansion Project

Workforce compliance, health data sovereignty and field-verified competency across 118 miles of Rocky Mountain construction corridor

Sector: Federal government infrastructure  |  Engagement: June 2020 – September 2023  |  Role: Compliance and workforce management platform

Key findings

• Contact tracing fell from two to three days of phone calls to under fifteen minutes.
• More than 56,000 paid orientation hours eliminated across 8,000+ workers.
• One person could verify operator competency on a project of 10,600+ workers.
• Every safety audit passed from month two, scored directly from Tansi reporting.
• Six standard modules, no custom build, first one live within 24 hours.

Overview

The Trans Mountain Expansion Project (TMEP) is a federally owned pipeline expansion and one of the largest infrastructure undertakings in recent Canadian history. Tansi was engaged by a general contractor delivering approximately 118 miles (190 km) of that corridor across two construction spreads and multiple work sites in British Columbia.

The engagement began in June 2020 with a single urgent requirement: track pandemic health screening for a mobile, multi-employer workforce in a way that could withstand federal and provincial privacy scrutiny. It ended in September 2023 having grown into the project’s system of record for worker qualification, competency verification, site attendance, subcontractor reporting, emergency notification and workforce participation reporting.

Over that period Tansi managed 10,600+ workers across 35+ subcontractor organizations — while simultaneously running as the operational system of record on Coastal GasLink and NGTL, for a combined 15,600+ workers across three concurrent major infrastructure programs.

Nothing on this project was custom-built. TMEP deployed six standard Tansi modules and configured them to the project’s requirements — which is why the first of them was in production within 24 hours, and why new requirements could be met in days as they emerged.

“We hired Tansi for one specific thing. What we didn’t expect was how many manual steps and workarounds quietly disappeared along with it — half of them nobody ever asked them to fix. They just stopped being necessary.”

— Site Administrator, TMEP contractor

Requirement one: health data the project could legally hold

What the project needed

Under federal public health direction, every worker on site required rapid antigen (RAD) testing at an approved frequency — every three days while working, and again on return after any absence from site exceeding 24 hours. The project also had to record vaccination status, vaccine type, dose dates and scanned proof-of-vaccination documents.

That created a set of non-negotiable requirements:

• Data residency, verified rather than asserted. Personal health information had to remain resident in Canada, with the storage location confirmable in writing.
• Backup residency, equally verified. Primary storage location is only half the question. Backups, replicas and disaster-recovery copies had to be accounted for too.
• Statutory compliance. Handling had to satisfy the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) — Canada’s counterpart to the United States HIPAA framework — together with British Columbia’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIPPA) and applicable health information legislation.
• Data integrity. A screening record that could be back-dated, duplicated or edited without trace was worse than no record at all.
• Speed to clinical action. Positive results had to reach clinical staff and then contact tracing in hours, not days.
• Worker-centered records. The workforce was multi-employer and mobile across three bases and multiple sites. Records had to follow the worker, not the employer or the site.

Why the available tools did not fit

The project worked through six or more approaches before engaging Tansi, adopting each in turn and abandoning it when it could not meet the requirement set. These included spreadsheet-based tracking, a desktop database, web form tools, a collaborative work-management platform and a badge-scanning physical security system.

• Residency could not be confirmed. Records were replicated to infrastructure outside the country, and providers would not confirm in writing where personal health information was stored.
• Backups were the blind spot. Even where a vendor could demonstrate Canadian primary residency, none would confirm where backups were held. Canadian hosting with unconfirmed offshore backup does not meet the requirement — it only appears to.
• Data quality collapsed at scale. Free-text entry across thousands of workers and dozens of employers produced duplicate, mismatched and unverifiable records.
• No party would attest to compliance. Vendors would not warrant that their handling met PIPEDA or the applicable provincial privacy and health information requirements.
• Nothing connected. Test results, worker identity, site attendance and clinical review sat in separate tools with no shared record.

What Tansi delivered

Tansi was in production use within 24 hours of contract execution, and contact tracing was operational within days.

• Verified test capture. Site nurses recorded RAD results against a verified worker identity rather than a typed name, eliminating the duplicate and mismatched records that had defeated earlier attempts. More than 200,000 test records were processed over the engagement.
• Vaccination records. Over 2,500 vaccination records were maintained, including vaccine type, dose dates, current status and scanned proof-of-vaccination documents, held under the same residency and access controls.
• Nurse portal. Occupational health nurses employed by the project entered results and confirmed worker identity at the point of testing.
• Physician portal. A positive result automatically notified the project physician, who could review the result and initiate contact tracing directly from the same record.
• Contact tracing. Because attendance, crew assignment and test results shared one record across all three bases, tracing a positive case dropped from two to three days of manual phone calls to under fifteen minutes.

Table scrolls horizontally on narrow screens.

Requirement two: knowing who is on site, and whether they should be

What the project needed

Safety audits had identified gaps in workforce control that are common on large multi-employer sites and serious in their consequences. The project needed to answer four questions reliably, at any moment, for any worker, at any of three bases:

• Is this person approved to be on this site?
• Have they completed the required orientation?
• Are their safety tickets valid today, verified against the issuing provider, and legally recognized in this province?
• Are they here right now, and were they here yesterday?

The general contractor’s enterprise HR system was built to manage employees. It could not manage contractors, could not extend appropriate access to site administrators, and could not model project-specific duties and qualification requirements. That is not a defect in the product — it is a scope boundary. But it left the project without a way to govern the majority of the people on its sites.

Orientation: nine hours that produced no work

Site orientation was delivered in person and ran nine hours or more. A paid trainer delivered it. Workers were paid twelve hours for the day and produced no work. They then went home and started work the following day. Every new worker cost the project a full paid day before contributing anything, and every new worker consumed trainer time and facility capacity at one of three bases an hour apart.

Tansi moved orientation into an online learning management system. Workers completed it at home before site approval, subsidized at five hours. They arrived on site oriented, approved and ready to work on their first shift.

Safety tickets — and tickets that were not legally valid

Tansi tracked, for every worker, the issuing training provider, the course name, the expiry date and a scan of the ticket itself — giving the project verified qualifications rather than self-declared ones.

• Automated notifications to the worker at 90, 60 and 30 days before expiry, and on expiry.
• Parallel notification to HR so lapses were visible to the organization, not only to the individual.
• Forward-looking expiry reports used to plan and budget training ahead of need rather than react to a lapse.

Capturing the issuing provider had a consequence nobody had anticipated. Some tickets held by workers on the project were not legally recognized in British Columbia, despite having been accepted by the general contractor. Because Tansi recorded the issuing authority rather than only the course name, those tickets could be identified and rejected — removing a real regulatory exposure that a course-name-only record would never have surfaced.

The system reported on qualification status rather than mechanically blocking site access, keeping the decision with the site supervisor while removing the excuse of not knowing.

Audit outcome

From month two of the engagement forward, the project passed its safety audits. Trans Mountain scored those audits directly from Tansi reporting — the compliance record and the audit evidence were the same artifact, produced continuously rather than assembled retroactively.

Daily work reports and invoice integrity

Subcontractors submitted daily work reports through Tansi. Because those reports sat alongside verified attendance, the project gained an independent record of who was actually on site on any given day.

Other departments used that record to reconcile subcontractor invoicing, and it surfaced inconsistencies — including workers being billed for days they were not on site. The compliance system paid for itself in a department that had not commissioned it.

Requirement three: proof in the field, on a mountainside, without a network

Competency verification was the hardest problem on the project

Safety tickets prove a worker completed a course. Competency assessments prove a worker can actually operate a specific piece of equipment in specific conditions — and on steep mountain slopes, that distinction is the difference between a controlled operation and a fatality.

The general contractor held competency assessments in a purpose-built internal system. One person on the entire project had access to it.

The practical result was that verification usually did not happen. When Trans Mountain requested proof of competency, producing it was a multi-day administrative exercise. When a supervisor in the field needed to know whether an operator was cleared for a steep-slope work area, there was no way to find out at the moment the decision had to be made.

What Tansi delivered

• Competency tracked at site level. Assessments were recorded against the worker and the site rather than locked in a head-office system, so the people responsible for the work area could see them.
• Proof delivered in the field. A worker’s supervisor could produce competency evidence on a mobile device at the work area, in minutes, without a support ticket and without waiting for business hours.
• Supervisor-to-worker assignment. Workers were assigned to a supervisor, and that supervisor could see the full safety picture for their crew — orientation, tickets, competencies, expiries — as one view rather than four enquiries.
• Offline viewing. Across a 118-mile mountain corridor with limited and intermittent internet service, safety records remained viewable in the field with no connectivity. A verification system that only works where there is signal does not work on this project.
• Multi-base, multi-site by design. Three operational bases an hour apart, and multiple sites under each, worked from the same record — with the same information available at head office, at the yard and at the work front.

“Before Tansi, confirming a worker’s certification meant submitting a request and waiting days. Now it takes minutes, and supervisors have direct access to their own crews’ tickets. On a site that changes daily, that’s the difference between knowing and assuming.”

— Site Safety Advisor, TMEP contractor

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Requirement four: reaching the workforce in minutes

The decision to deploy mass communication through Tansi followed a specific event. A section of mountainside collapsed near the corridor, and the project had no way to notify its workforce. Thousands of people were distributed across 118 miles of active construction in mountainous terrain, working for dozens of different employers out of three bases, and there was no single channel that reached them.

Tansi mass communication was configured with pre-built emergency message templates and audience targeting by crew, supervisor, contractor, base or whole project.

• 2,300+ workers reached in a single notification.
• Five minutes to full delivery.
• Used operationally for highway accident and road closure alerts — significant where crews travel an hour between bases on mountain highways — and adopted for routine work updates as well as emergencies.

The pattern is worth noting: a channel stood up for emergencies became the project’s everyday communication tool, which is precisely what makes it reliable when an emergency does occur. A notification system nobody uses is a notification system nobody reads.

Requirement five: proving workforce commitments were real

Trans Mountain carried mandated reporting obligations on workforce composition and community participation. Those reports were consumed by Trans Mountain, shared with the federal government, and provided selectively to participating communities.

Tansi produced:

• Workforce demographic reporting across the full multi-employer workforce.
• Local, regional and national workforce distribution mapping.
• Training expenditure reporting by workforce segment.
• Gantt-charted man-hours showing not only whether a worker was engaged, but the pattern of that engagement — full-time, part-time or intermittent.

That last capability changed what the reporting could be used for. Contractors had committed to local hire and community workforce participation in their contracts. Charting actual hours worked against those commitments made it possible to verify them — and the project identified contractors whose stated participation was not borne out by the hours their workforce actually recorded.

Results at a glance

Why it worked: built while the project was running

The single most important characteristic of this engagement was not any individual feature. It was that Tansi did not arrive as a finished product and ask the project to conform to it.

Tansi was configured and extended while the project was live, in response to requirements as they emerged — and on a pandemic-era federal project, requirements emerged constantly and changed on short notice. Public health direction shifted. Audit findings created new obligations. A ticket turned out not to be valid in the province it was being used in. Departments that had nothing to do with the original scope discovered the data was useful to them.

The engagement began as pandemic health screening. It ended as the project’s system of record for workforce compliance. No procurement process anticipated that, and none needed to.

That was possible because Tansi is modular. The project started with the modules it needed and added others as the requirement appeared — without a new procurement, a new vendor, or a migration. Tansi never replaced the general contractor’s enterprise systems; it covered the operational layer those systems were never built to reach, and left everything else alone.

“On a project this size, the risk isn’t the technology — it’s a system that can’t change when the project does. The legacy systems we looked at told us what they could do and what we’d have to live with. Tansi asked what we needed, adapted to our project, and delivered in days rather than quarters. That’s not a feature. That’s the whole difference.”

— Project Safety Manager, TMEP contractor

What this means for public sector organizations

TMEP is a pipeline project. Most organizations reading this are not building pipelines. The underlying problems, however, are not construction problems — they are the problems of any public body accountable for people it does not directly employ, distributed across sites it does not staff continuously.

Contractor and vendor compliance

A city, county, state agency, school district, special district or health system is responsible for who comes onto its property and into its facilities, whether or not those people are on its payroll. Contractors, service vendors, consultants, substitutes and casual staff arrive with credentials the organization is expected to have verified — background and criminal history checks, professional licenses and certifications, safety credentials, insurance, mandatory training — and those credentials expire.

Enterprise HR systems are built for employees. They generally cannot govern the contracted workforce, which is often where the greatest exposure sits. TMEP faced exactly this gap at a scale of 35+ organizations and 10,600+ people. The mechanism that solved it — a verified record per person, credential tracking against the issuing authority, expiry notification before the lapse, and reporting that doubles as audit evidence — transfers directly.

The British Columbia ticket finding is the version of this problem most organizations have and cannot see: a credential accepted in good faith that is not actually valid for the jurisdiction it is being used in. Licensing and certification in the United States are largely state-level, and reciprocity between states is inconsistent — a credential perfectly valid in one state may carry no standing in the next. An organization operating across state lines, or hiring workers credentialed elsewhere, carries this exposure without knowing it. Recording the issuing authority, not just the credential name, is what makes it visible.

Verification at the point of decision

The competency problem on TMEP was not that records did not exist. They existed, in a well-built system, held by one authorized person. They simply could not be reached by the person who needed them, at the moment the decision had to be made.

That pattern is everywhere in the public sector. The record proving a contractor is cleared to be in a school, a substitute has a current record check, a caregiver is certified for a procedure, or an operator is qualified for a piece of equipment often sits behind a business-hours request to a central team. The information is not missing. It is unreachable, which in operational terms is the same thing.

Systems that change when the requirement changes

Public sector requirements are not stable. Legislation is amended, ministries issue new directives, funding and contribution agreements attach new reporting conditions, and an audit finding can create an obligation with a deadline attached. The common failure is not choosing a poor system; it is choosing a system that cannot follow the requirement, and then managing the gap in spreadsheets alongside it.

Tansi is modular and is configured and extended in-flight. Organizations deploy the modules they need alongside the ERP and enterprise systems they already own, and add others as requirements appear — without a migration, a re-procurement, or the political exposure of a failed rip-and-replace. The TMEP engagement is the evidence: a deployment that began as pandemic screening became the project’s workforce compliance system of record, because it could be changed while it was running.

Data sovereignty and privacy

Personal information held by a public body — student records, client and patient health information, employee and volunteer data — carries obligations under HIPAA for protected health information, FERPA for student education records, and a growing body of state privacy and data-handling law. Increasingly it carries explicit data residency requirements as well.

Tansi holds client data in its country of origin, and holds backups there too. For United States clients that means US data centers. Tansi has completed a SOC 2 Type II audit.

On TMEP, backup residency was the question that eliminated vendors who had already satisfied every other requirement. Domestic primary hosting with unconfirmed offshore backup does not meet a residency requirement; it only appears to. It is the question most procurement processes forget to ask, and the one worth asking first.

The TMEP data described in this case study was held in Canada because the project was Canadian. Residency follows the client, not the vendor.

Working where connectivity is not guaranteed

Rural school districts, remote clinics and health facilities, field inspection teams, emergency response and public works crews all operate in places where connectivity is unreliable. A compliance system that fails without signal transfers the problem back to paper at exactly the moment accuracy matters most. Tansi was built to be read offline because the corridor demanded it.

Emergency notification

Reaching a distributed population in minutes — staff across facilities, contractors on site, crews in the field — is a capability most organizations assume they have until they need it. TMEP made this a priority only after a mountainside collapsed and they had no way to tell anyone. The pattern holds broadly: the gap is usually discovered during the emergency.