thl Success Story

Tourism Holdings is the name behind the tourism brands everyone knows; the Black Water Rafting and Glowworm Cave experiences at Waitomo, the big green Kiwi Experience buses, and all the Maui, Britz and Mighty campervans driving between Cape Reinga and bluff.

The team at Tourism Holdings have been using ecoPortal to manage their health, safety and sustainability performance across all of their business units in New Zealand and Australia and are now looking at introducing ecoPortal into their businesses in the United States. A year into our relationship we chatted to them about their experience.

• What were the goals you wanted to achieve from using ecoPortal?

  The key goal was to get everyone recording events, be they incidents or near misses, in the same way across the business. This meant people had to easily log an incident while out on the road, in the office, or the workshop, in our sites in New Zealand, Australia and, soon, the United States. This was closely followed by enabling the data to be easily accessed on meaningful dashboards, so that our CEO, executive team and Board had access to the most up to date information when and wherever they needed it. Finally, we needed an escalation process that meant the right people were notified to make sure action happened to address issues as soon as possible.

• What were the challenges you were facing before using ecoPortal?

  Previously, we managed health and safety like many other businesses, with a whole range of forms and spreadsheets. Our big problem was that we had so many business units, all reporting slightly different information in different ways, the Board was getting data and metrics that didn't stack up, making their job difficult. There was little transparency, standardisation and visibility of the health and safety management process.

• What is your favourite thing about ecoPortal?

  The key thing about ecoPortal is that all health and safety data and information lives in one place. For me this has two key benefits, one, it means that you can filter and search, compare and visualise pretty much anything, and be confident that it is based on quality data. This helps when you are looking for true trends and want to know what is happening behind each data point. The other is that information in the system can be shared with users, meaning that risks, incidents and learning can be shared across the organisation. This really fosters engagement and participation and supports the culture of health and safety.

• What is the impact ecoPortal has had?

  Well, above providing clarity and visibility of the whole process, and correct data and metrics for management, we have seen a massive reduction in Lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR). We’ve managed to slash LTIFR by two thirds in the 18 months that thl has been using ecoPortal. This means fewer people are getting hurt, and those that do are spending less time away from work, so there are huge cultural and financial benefits to this.