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The human touch
Industry has expanded to new reaches, both online and in undeveloped, remote territories. With increased activity and movement in remote areas across the globe comes new opportunities as well as logistics challenges.
While the traditional logistics industry, one focussed on the transportation of goods from one point to another, has seen increased precision and timeliness with this expansion, workforce logistics still has room to grow.
The logistics industry has perfected moving a simple product from source to destination but is still lagging when it comes to making sure people travel between destinations safely, efficiently and stress-free.
The Australian Mining Review speaks with the Nomadis team about the identification of this gap and championing a new category of logistics, human logistics.
Protecting people first
Nomadis provides a workforce logistics program that empowers organisations to maintain the highest level of excellence, attention to detail and overall care for the movement of employees.
Founder and chief executive Jean-Philippe Lavallée says Nomadis is focussed on serving and protecting people first.
“There are so many tools for moving goods around, but when it comes to people, the options are limited and poorly integrated,” he said.
“We are committed to innovate and deliver the best technological solution and service to our clients, so that they achieve the highest level of excellence in how they manage mobilisation and travel for their workforce.”
Nomadis is setting the industry standard by providing the technology and foundation to promote the best practices in human logistics by offering a fully integrated and automated solution for workforce and travel management.
Automation of human logistics in mining
Mining companies face complex challenges when mobilising personnel from home to site. Remote mine sites and fly-in fly-outs (FIFOs) increase the demands of operating safely and keeping a budget under control. The Nomadis workforce logistics program streamlines the process.
Rather than managers employing multiple disconnected systems to manage certifications, flights, accommodation and rosters, Nomadis unifies and automates those systems within the program. This minimises manual involvement in the process, reducing human error and improving efficiency by allowing project managers and site coordinators to focus on exceptions management and delivering on site, rather than being concerned with manually tracking everyone’s movements across the site, state, or country.
Sales and marketing director Sébastien Cloutier says automation and integration are what sets them apart from competitors.
“Through automation and integration, we really can drive efficiency and remove errors,” he said.
“We had customers saving hundreds of thousands in errors.
“No-shows are costly. Someone showing up to camp who cannot work because they don’t have the certification is also very costly. These costs add up very quickly when you have operations of several thousand people.”
To combat the cost of no-shows and errors, the software automates the validation of internal requirements based on the company’s business rules, then uses application programming interface (API) to access external systems and automatically determine when and how workers come to site. Once a travel journey is confirmed, several mechanisms and notifications ensure the traveller, the camp and the transportation providers stay in the loop.
“We validate the entire chain before we let the travel team commit to an expense that will not work in the end,” said Sébastien.
“Are there enough seats on the charter plane? Are there enough seats on the bus taking people from the airstrip to the camp? Is there enough room in the camp?”
Nomadis is familiar with the complexities of the mining industry and continuously adapts to these concerns.
High costs of transportation and accommodation
With large workforces traveling to remote mine sites comes hefty transportation and accommodation costs. Mine sites must keep track of flights for hundreds or thousands of workers while maintaining lodgings and keeping stock of inventory, housekeeping and daily meal services.
Traditionally, employees would manually make and confirm reservations, make travel arrangements to get to site and submit booking requests to their employer, potentially leading to mistakes and wasted time. Nomadis changes this through automating the role of a travel coordinator or agent by establishing a routine based off rosters and business rules to automatically generate travel plans for simple or complex journeys. Travel plans can then be easily booked, as the program is integrated with airlines, reservation systems and global distribution systems such as Travelport, SABRE and InteliSys.
Nomadis also offers a built-in property management system (PMS) for camps and lodges, which features inventory allotments as well as housekeeping and meals management.
Within the PMS are algorithms to optimise check ins/outs and overall camp capacity. When reservations are made, the system will use this algorithm to determine room allotments based on the established business rules. Managers can allocate blocks of rooms and track room usage for optimisation.
The program also includes accounting modules that track all expenses related to trips. This allows for reconciliation of invoices for expenses related to reservations, hosting contractors at the camp and meals sold. Nomadis ensures the proper amounts for each expense are included before pushing the results to the accounting system.
Scarcity of qualified personnel
With highly specialised workforces, tight regulations and long rotations, mine sites may end up with a lack of qualified personnel on site. Nomadis prevents this, by ensuring employee certifications are easily accessible, up to date and automatically processed in its system, so only people who are qualified are sent to site.
Nomadis allows for workforce scheduling across multiple sites and for workers on rotation or ad hoc with automated booking capabilities. The program features customisable employee and contractor profiles that are synchronised to human resources and enterprise resource planning systems such as SAP, Workday, Oracle/JDE and others.
The program also includes its own compliance module. Within the module, conditions can be set for employees to go to site. The system will automatically check employee profiles to validate if they have the correct and updated certifications to go to site on specific dates. If an employee isn’t qualified or their certification is expired, the ability to create a reservation will be blocked.
The program also checks for employee leave periods before assigning an employee to go to site at a certain time. Employees can then be rebooked or cancelled automatically or after supervisor approval.
Safety and security challenges
Work on potentially dangerous mine sites introduces exponential safety and security challenges that companies must mitigate. Nomadis helps deal with some of this risk through its secure and efficient delivery of essential information.
Through the integration of access control and smart card (RFID) systems, Nomadis offers automatic electronic mustering in the event of emergency.
Managers can access a dashboard that displays live locations of all people on site and in transit, their work shift, room numbers and arrival and departure dates so they know exactly where their people are in real-time. This automated electronic mustering reduces potential human error and the time it takes to perform vital safety measures such as evacuation.
Global reputation and performance
Established in Canada over 20 years ago, Nomadis has established itself as a leading provider in workforce logistics specialising in remote sites. Headquartered in Montreal, Quebec and operating with clients across five continents, Nomadis is experienced in solving workforce logistics challenges no matter the location.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s Australia or Canada, mining companies need a system that is working and that is efficient,” says business development coordinator Melissa Fleury.
Advantages of Nomadis
1. Eliminates manual work
2.Reduces risk of errors
3.Integrates your enterprise systems
4. Keeps your data safe
5. Optimises flight & camp utilisation
Nomadis began operating in Australia in 2011, after identifying challenges and opportunities in the healthcare market similar to those it helped solve across Canada. Seeing that other workforce logistics programs lacked integrations and automation, Nomadis began expanding its solutions, offering a fully integrated platform for managing remote workforces. This sparked interest across the mining and resources sector and Nomadis expanded its clientele, working with mining companies across Canada, USA, Australia and other countries.
Jean-Philippe says Nomadis is invested in growing its presence in Australia, establishing the same level of excellence with local, dedicated customer service and cloud infrastructure.
“Our model is to engage the entire human logistics supply chain by offering an open platform with which other providers can easily integrate. In the end, we are all important pieces that need to be connected to deliver seamless human logistics to mining companies across the globe.”
Nomadis integrates every system involved in the human logistics supply chain including scheduling, travel, aviation, accommodation and bus/ground transport to efficiently manage workforces.
Australia (Toll-free): +1 800 423 687
