As one of Latin America’s most successful gas carriers, TGS depends on intelligent technology every day to meet the world’s growing demand for energy.
TGS is dedicated to operating with efficiency, responsibility, and safety — be it on site at drilling locations or in offices across Argentina. But to keep employees healthy during a pandemic, leaders at TGS knew they needed to do more.
The company sought to pair the right technology with existing employee data in order to track and manage key insights related to its workforce and the pandemic. Specifically, leaders wanted a solution that could provide this information to decision-makers quickly and intuitively.
Making Strategic Staffing Decisions Safely
SAP solutions offered an alternative to the company’s Microsoft Excel-based processes. At the outset of the pandemic, leaders at TGS began keeping track of which of the company’s approximately 1,100 employees had recently traveled. They used spreadsheets to note this and other key data, such as health conditions that could put an employee at high risk for COVID-19 as well as any illnesses that could be mistaken for the virus, like the common cold.
“At TGS, we are committed to pursuing excellence in health and safety. We constantly outdo ourselves in that regard, and our initiatives in the face of this pandemic are no different,” Julián Cukier, head of Operational Health at TGS, said. “To protect our workforce and business, we need to be able to act fast. Real-time data on the health of all our employees makes that possible.”
But as the situation worsened worldwide, Cukier and other leaders knew that they would also need a way to provide decision-makers across the business with swift access to these insights. And they would have to be easy to interpret and use, too. So, TGS integrated and adapted an extension for SAP SuccessFactors software that empowers managers and other team leaders to make safe, informed decisions regarding employees based on key risk factors. Created by SAP partner iXerv, the new free extension enables companies to proactively tackle the challenges of the pandemic with data-driven insights.
Simple, on-demand access to this information will prove especially valuable once TGS teams return to the office. For instance, if a manager needs to put together a team for a project that requires travel, they can make that decision without putting a high-risk employee at even greater risk. And with SAP Analytics Cloud, they can compile that information into charts and graphs that enable them to see workforce-wide health and behavior trends.
Moving Business Forward with a Healthy Workforce
Due to the confidential nature of this data, users cannot tap into any information on fellow employees’ specific medical conditions. Employees are only listed as belonging to an at-risk group or a non-risk group. In the extension, users can filter through those groups as well as employees’ ages, another risk factor for COVID-19. It also offers insight into employees that have come in contact with the virus and need to be quarantined.
To date, more than half of all TGS employees have voluntarily registered their information using SAP Fiori. And from there, the company hopes to continue to use SAP Fiori to further safeguard the well-being of employees. Specifically, its leaders intend to use a database of comprehensive medical information beyond COVID-19 risk factors to determine which employees can safely complete certain tasks – such as working at great heights or in confined spaces.
“We depend on technology as a strategic ally to overcome the challenges of our wide geographic range and other unique complexities,” shared Paula Bezzi, application leader at TGS. “We already had a powerful suite of SAP solutions at our disposal. Without involving too much effort or extra time, we used these solutions and the new solution extension to provide visibility and predictive capabilities to the business to care for our people.”
