Jeffrey E Kline, President and CEOEnter Compliance Solutions, an industry leader in occupational health and safety training. The company brings multiple approaches to compliance training to keep their clients compliant with the regulations. The company provides instructor-led training, online learning, and on-site training to a diverse clientele, including environmental, manufacturing, healthcare, construction, general industry, government, and military.Founded on December 15, 1995, in Denver, Colorado, Compliance Solutions provides training and services for over 14,000 clients all over the country. In this interview with Manage HR, Jeffrey E Kline, President and CEO of Compliance Solutions, discusses how they help organizations meet the mandatory compliance in occupational health and safety.
Could you give us a summary of Compliance Solutions?
As an occupational health and training company, Compliance Solutions focuses primarily on providing training to employees working in industries that handle hazardous materials. In its early days, we focused more on providing instructor-led seminars, and later we included new types of training approaches into our program. Within nine months, since its inception, Compliance Solutions expanded the business to nine cities, and currently, we provide training in 58 cities. We came up with the first online training course, HAZWOPER (Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response), way back when the internet was still in its early growth stage.
The COVID-19 pandemic made us revamp our business. As it became nearly impossible to provide face-to-face training, we revamped our business by offering more online courses. However, the situation is coming back to normal, and we will be able to resume our live trainer-led sessions shortly.
Could you shed light on the typical challenges faced by organizations looking for occupational health and safety?
Compliance Solutions was founded on the idea that companies do not need to spend 90 percent of its operations budget on training. When we got into the industry, the average cost of a 40-hour HAZWOPER course was about 1,500 dollars. We came to the market offering the same course at a much lower price. In essence, we can provide the products at a reasonable price pointthat almost 95 percent of our prospective clients can afford.
We collaborate with any company requiringtraining on OSHA guidelines referenced under 29 CFR, a code of federal regulations. We have collaborated with some of the largest companies in the world, including oil and gas companies, pipeline companies, rigs, construction firms, drilling companies, and more.
As an occupational safety and health training company, our job is to make sure that our students remember key aspects of the training when they walk out of the door
With a compliance and risk management program, they can save a lot of money overtime if they implement them in the right manner. However, for many companies, compliance and risk management is an uphill task. We help such companies implement a great health and safety program and an excellent risk management strategy.
What are some of the novel features of your training programs?
Our training programs enable the learners to remember the content. In fact, there’s no way a trainer can teach a learner every single section of OSHO, EPA, or any other regulations. As an occupational safety and health training company, our job is to ensure that our students remember key aspects of the training when they walk out of the door. We enable them to assess hazardous situations and take appropriate actions. Our training sessions are handled by experts who come with extensive field experience. For that reason, they understand what learners need to know when they work at the site.
We offer our clients incredible experience throughout the engagement. Clients can choose the training course based on their requirements. For example, they can opt for a training session that can include thousands of employees. We allow companies to interface their training with other companies online. They can track the learners’ progress using various indices like exam scores, quizzes, and more. We also allow the client to integrate our Learning Management System (LMS) with their ERP system. If they use an in-house LMS, we enable them to bring the entire content into a single platform and offer a seamless training experience.
Could you share with us an instance that highlights the benefits brought to one of your clients after approaching you?
More recently, several improvements have been made to federal regulations and standards. For instance, the hazardous material transportation standard was updated a few years ago. The new standard, Global Harmonization System (GHS), imposed new transportation requirements for hazardous materials. The new system provided guidance on classifying chemicals and their mixtures according to its criteria or rules. Moreover, GHS updated the old placarding system and made it more understandable. In this regard, we trained employees on various components of the new GHS system. The training enables employees to understand the safety data sheet and take immediate actions in emergency situations.
What does the future hold for Compliance Solutions?
In the last 25 years of successful operation, we have grown our customer base substantially. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we used to train more than 15,000 students a year. Currently, we work with over 9,000 customers.
We are updating our ERP system to bring 11 different disparate systems under a single umbrella. This will enable us to look into the whereabouts of our customersand their requirements easily. Moving ahead, we plan to expand our business to new areas of occupational health and safety. We are also planning to change the way we train students by bringing new digital tools that allow us to provide a seamless learning experience. I visualize a time in the not-so-distant future where a group of learners attend a training course in one location, and at the same time, another group attends a virtual copy of the same session at another location.
