Manufacturing Industry Case Study Banner_Koppers_Motifworks

Fleet Safety Analytics Business Intelligence Solution

Koppers Inc. fueling a
Zero Harm Culture with Fleet Management Dashboard

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Industry: Chemicals

Emp Size: 1,001-5,000

Founded: 1988

Headquarters: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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Koppers is a leading integrated global producer of carbon compounds, chemicals and treated wood products for the aluminum, railroad, specialty chemical, utility, rubber, steel, residential lumber and agriculture industries. Headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Koppers serves its customers through a comprehensive global manufacturing and distribution network, with facilities located in North America, South America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. With a focus on Protecting What Matters and Preserving the Future, Koppers is committed to a Zero Harm culture that strives to place the care of employees, environment and communities first at all times.

“Motifworks was the ideal company because they had the flexibility to adjust timing, budget, plans and ideas. They brought in a variety of talent, resources and skillsets that could be scaled up or down as we needed. We knew they would deliver.”

Tushar Lavalekar

Vice President of IT

Koppers Inc.

Business Challenges – Data Consolidation and Utilization

As a company, Koppers is well known for its Zero Harm culture of keeping the care and protection of people, environment and communities above all else. In Early 2020, Koppers decided to align Information Technology with the company’s Zero Harm team to better capitalize on the pivotal role that technology plays in all aspects of protecting our people, communities and environment. This change resulted in a number of innovative ideas, leading to significant improvements in safety and efficiency company wide. One example of this is the development of Koppers’ fleet management dashboard.

While working to protect and preserve with a focus on sustainability, Koppers team members were actively working to mine their incoming data to help further their Zero Harm culture. However, they were struggling to consolidate the data that they were receiving from multiple sources. Data about safety, drivers, speed, employee files and many other sources was being manually sorted into over fifteen spreadsheets that would then be distributed to upper-level executives and management. The team instead wanted to be able to gather meaningful insights at the click of a button. This was clearly a dauting task, so Koppers made the decision to bring in a trusted cloud consulting partner to help them develop a way to consolidate the data on a centralized platform. This would allow the company to establish metrics, improve safety, increase awareness, and provide a platform that would allow upper-level executives to access all the necessary data instantaneously and effortlessly.

“We were impressed with Motifworks’ willingness to make changes during the process. They were able to bring new ideas to the table and helped us improve and adjust the dashboard as the process progressed.”

Beau VanDyke

Director - Global Safety & Health

Koppers Inc.

Solution – Fleet Management Dashboard

The Motifworks team worked to create the fleet safety management dashboard. This unique dashboard consolidated data about driver safety, speeding, equipment utilization, drive time, inspections, service violations and more. Not only was this data consolidated in one location with big data analytics, but it can now be easily sorted, narrowed down, and made accessible to those who need it most. Data was effortlessly transformed into accessible metrics, which became actionable items. Koppers employees can now track the many metrics necessary for improvement and understand the value of those metrics to meet company goals. This allows the company to keep communities safe with safe driving and safe equipment, while also working towards improved environmental sustainability by monitoring diesel usage, idle time and reduced emissions. Additionally, resource allocation can now be addressed since the company can determine whether it should purchase additional resources like Auxiliary Power Units (APU) based on the idle time of vehicles.

The transparency provided by this dashboard allows business units to view each other’s progress and set positive examples for the drivers and employees, creating incentive to improve as individuals and as a unit. Additionally, there is now more clarity into what managers and executives are looking for from drivers, creating two-way communication within the company. Multiple company business units, including executives, managers and drivers, can now easily operate as a whole with the transparency that has been provided by the dashboard. The company can also more easily understand the FMCSA score, which relies heavily on equipment and inspections, because team members can see exactly how often inspections are performed, in addition to any service violations.

Moving forward, Koppers can utilize this dashboard to find leading indicators to target precursors to actual incidents. When the company reduces speeding events there are less at-risk driving events, such as hard brakes and hard corners. Koppers hopes to use the data to show trends so employees can be alerted of possible hazards and problems.

“As we were implementing new technologies into our fleet, we realized we were overwhelmed with information and did not have a way to disseminate and view data that was effective and meaningful. Motifworks provided a novel solution to that problem. Now the data is presented in a dashboard that is easy to view and understand, even without having in-depth knowledge of DOT regulations.“