In a bid to support customers’ risk management programs and further enhance tyre industry best practices, Kal Tire is sitting at the table in safety forums with mining leaders from around the world.

One of the mining industry’s biggest struggles is, how do we manage risk given that we still need people to do many potentially dangerous tasks? “The industry is working very hard on that,” says Peter Larsen, VP of international safety, sales, and marketing at Kal Tire’s Mining Tire Group.

Finding the answer to that question, and being in a room with people who need and want it answered most, set Larsen on a path that brought him to the table of several of health and safety forums, including the Mining Safety Roundtable.

Larsen represents Kal Tire and participates in a number of safety gatherings, affording the Mining Tire Group the opportunity to draw on industry leadership and best practice for the benefit of the company and its customers. “We’ve made it our business to be actively engaged in established health and safety forums because we see the value in accessing and employing the latest guidance around best practice, but we also have specific expertise and experience we can contribute to the conversation.”

And with Kal Tire’s recent acquisition of the tyre services business of Australia’s Klinge & Co., renowned for its high safety standards, Kal Tire’s Mining Tire Group certainly has much to bring to the table. “The combination of Kal Tire and Klinge experience along with both companies’ training and development resources are extensive,” says Dan Allan, senior vice president, Kal Tire’s Mining Tire Group, “Being able to leverage that collective knowledge has been a significant benefit for Kal Tire, our customers and the forums we participate in.”

At many industry safety forums, mining leaders discuss how to implement and improve safety initiatives at every level.

“With safety, the speed and efficiency of learning is paramount. Understanding context of incidents is a key component of that learning and can only be achieved through discussion in safety forums, formal or informal,” says Larsen. In these discussions, Larsen’s goal is to learn and understand what industry’s risks are, and then to bring that experience to Kal Tire’s strategies and programs, and ensure operations align with mitigating those risks.

“We want to make sure that with Kal Tire, ‘worrying about the contractor’ is not something any customer needs to do.”

“We use our collective Kal Tire experience in conjunction with the knowledge we gain from these forums to help ensure that our practices and procedures remain at the leading edge of risk management.” “Essentially, this is the architecture of how we manage risk. By understanding the risk in front of us, and designing our training and mentoring accordingly to handle all of that, we’ve developed a demonstrated, systemic process.”

That system, that way of managing risk, is particularly critical for Kal Tire. With more than 2,000 tyre technicians outfitting, maintaining and repairing earthmover tyres on five continents, the company needed a way to train all team members to the Kal Tire Standard.

“In our world, so many of our tasks still require hands-on technology and manual manipulation, so our best defense is rigorous training,” says Larsen.

It might be an understatement to call the training rigorous…Kal Tire has more than 300 courses available in their online Learning Management System (LMS), with technicians being assigned specific ‘training curriculums’ based on their role, the critical tasks they perform and the tooling and equipment they handle.

Depending on the nature of the role, training may take up to 27 months to complete, with dozens of specific hands-on (critical tasks) being evaluated by Kal Tire field assessors. Only when trainees are observed to be able to perform a specific task safely and to the Kal Tire Standard are they signed off as competent. With the LMS recording every step of the journey, it’s clear exactly which tasks each team member is qualified to perform. 

The result is a fully trained technician who knows the hazards and controls of the trade, the tools they work with, and the equipment they are working on. “What all of this does is give the customer comfort and confidence,” says Allan. “It says, ‘You can trust us. We are the best at what we do.’” Kal Tire’s goal is that customers can expect to have that same level of confidence and world-class safety, wherever they operate.