Leaving Behind Decades of Documents: CalPortland Brings Environmental into the Digital Era

Customer Spotlight – Kacy Vance

Kacy Vance, an environmental manager of CalPortland Company, has worked in environmental compliance permitting for the last 20 years. Her latest feat has been to bring CalPortland into the digital era with Mapistry. 

The largest building materials company producing cement and construction material products in the western United States, CalPortland has operations in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, and Arizona as well as in British Columbia and Alberta. CalPortland’s commitment to environmental leadership has made the organization stronger and the primary choice of contractors. Learn firsthand how Kacy elevated her company from paper to progress.

Identifying reporting gaps

“Back in the old days, our tasks were tracked on a combination of Excel spreadsheets and never-updated Word documents,” Kacy said. “My predecessor was big on physical pieces of paper, so roughly 22 years of reports, discussions, performance and operational records were literally crammed into office filing cabinets.” 

While everything was in one place, mountains of paperwork made it hard for the CalPortland team to find what they needed. Plus, if somebody left the organization, information was easily lost. With more than 15,000 different inspections each year, their system of manual paperwork was not sustainable.

To top it all off, the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to proceed with the status quo. Contractors were mailing paperwork to Kacy’s plant each month, and by the time she received it, the information was already outdated. It was time for a change.

Adopting a digital platform

Kacy says that it was hard work to set it up, but Mapistry makes inspections easier for teams in the long run. Especially if you are as analog as Kacy’s team was. It’s a challenge to force inspectors to make a change, but one that’s worthwhile.

“This is how we’re doing it now,” Kacy said. What really helped get her team onboarded was the online training provided by Mapistry. Kacy worked with Mapistry to record a session that she could share with her team. This way, she didn’t have to work with everyone’s varied schedules.

Users can watch the training in a time that works best for them, and work with the app at their own pace.  Mapistry has a state-of-the-art training curriculum to deliver mandatory environmental compliance training for industrial manufacturers in a digital format that’s modern, compelling, engaging, and fun.

Additionally, Kacy encourages her team to reach out to Mapistry directly with questions, which has been a helpful tool in adoption.

Realizing the right solution

“It’s been kind of magical,” Kacy said. “All inspections, logs, tasks, documentation…everything shows up in one place.” Her team can see inspection reports immediately and return to review them at any time.

Reports are listed by the due date. Tasks, photos, documents, and tables are all in one place.  From a single dashboard, facilities get all the automation, data management, recordkeeping, regulatory guidance, enterprise visibility, and control they need to achieve best-in-class compliance while minimizing costs, resource utilization, and legal risk.

“Now we are catching things before they fall through the cracks,” she said. Mapistry can increase work capacity, enabling better productivity and execution.

Additionally, it massively reduces the high levels of risk and liability facing industrial facilities today due to outdated and insufficient environmental compliance programs. In fact, Kacy’s leader, Desirea Haggard shared:

“Mapistry has gained us some credibility with the regulators. Twice now, we’ve had inspections at our plants where they requested records. They came in, they saw Mapistry and all of the forms and inspections that were done and the review was so quick. What normally takes a full day of going through paperwork only took about an hour.” 

Gaining credibility with the regulators is invaluable. “You get what you put in the system,” Kacy said. “If you take your time and put a lot of data and effort into it, you will get that back out.”

CalPortland now has a quarterly review where Kacy shares screenshots of the analytics with their executive leadership. Mapistry has a collection of ready-made analytics dashboards where managers can easily monitor the health of their EHS program across all of their facilities and regulatory operations — including air, stormwater, wastewater, hazardous materials, waste, SPCC, and safety. 

• Check out CalPortland’s full case study