Delivering Individualized Training at Scale for Mahoney Environmental

→ DOWNLOAD CASE STUDY

Customer Snapshot

Mahoney Environmental is a US-based environmental services organization that specializes in collecting and recycling used cooking oil, fryer oil, and grease trap materials from the food service industry, turning them into useful raw materials for producing renewable fuels and sustainable products, such as renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel.

Founded in 1953 in Woodridge, Illinois, the organization began as a regional service and has grown to serve thousands of food operators, ranging from independent restaurants to large chains across the United States. The organization is a licensed EPA recycler with over 400 employees and extensive solutions.

The Challenge

Mahoney Environmental was acquired by Neste, a global producer of renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel. The acquisition expanded the organization’s reach and service capacity across the U.S., while also underscoring the need to standardize and formalize safety operations to support a larger, more distributed workforce.

As the organization scaled beyond its family-owned roots, existing safety procedures, risk policies, and governance structures varied by location. With more than 30 job sites nationwide and employees operating across multiple time zones, safety training delivery and reporting practices were inconsistent, making accountability and continuous improvement increasingly difficult.

This period of growth highlighted the need for a proactive safety culture, supported by a centralized safety training program and integrated safety management tools.

The Choice

With a distributed workforce and fragmented safety processes, the organization sought a comprehensive platform to unify training, streamline reporting, and foster a proactive safety culture at scale. Vector Solutions’ Safety, Compliance, and Workforce Readiness platform proved to be an ideal choice for driving a safety-forward culture within the organization.

With safety training aligned to regulatory requirements and reporting integrated into daily workflows, Mahoney Environmental created a more cohesive and scalable safety program. The combination improved hazard awareness, encouraged proactive reporting, and delivered measurable improvements in both operations and financial performance.

The Change

The partnership with Vector Solutions drove measurable operations and finance improvements and strengthened safety culture across the organization. Key changes include:

1. From Reactive to Proactive: The organization transitioned from responding to incidents as they occurred to proactively identifying and addressing them, preventing serious escalations and incident severity.
2. Building a Strong Safety Culture: Employees were equipped with the tools and knowledge to establish safety as a shared responsibility across the organization.
3. Improved Employee Morale: The seamless incident-reporting functionality of Vector EHS, paired with highly responsive leadership that addressed risks, led to higher employee engagement and proactive incident reporting, resulting in up to 3,500 reports per year.
4. Reduced Siloed Operations: When safety training and safety management tools were at every employee’s fingertips, regardless of location or shift, it removed barriers to learning and improved real-time communication among managers, employees, and the EHS team.
5. Improved Accessibility Led to Higher Completions: Integrating high-quality, ready-to-implement HSE training across devices increased the training completion rate to 99% making learning a part of the growth strategy.
6. Improved Compliance and Audit Readiness: The organization replaced a fully manual, paper-based training process with a unified safety, compliance, and workforce readiness platform that streamlined OSHA recordkeeping, eliminated the risk of manually producing training records, and enhanced training visibility for both site leaders and executive leadership.
7. Measurable Financial and Operational Impact: With consistent safety training and management, the organization experienced significantly reduced incident severity and workers’ compensation costs, including a substantial year-over-year decrease. The incident data has also provided leadership with actionable insights to guide prioritization and continuous improvement.

The Outcome

By combining expert-developed safety courses, a centralized learning management system, and an integrated EHS management system, Mahoney Environmental built a proactive safety environment focused on prevention, visibility, and accountability. This approach drove consistent hazard reporting, earlier corrective action, and over $2 million in safety-related cost savings, earning the organization Workforce Safety Seal Platinum recognition for sustained engagement across training and safety management

“In our first year, we saw about a 60% decrease in workers’ compensation costs, and this year we’re down over $2.2 million from that first year. Our workers’ compensation costs have decreased significantly since implementing Vector. A lot contributed to that: proactive reporting, training, building a safety culture, and real-time incident notifications that allow us to engage with employees as soon as something happens. Vector has really helped us reduce workers’ compensation costs, incident severity, and overall incident frequency.”

— Tania Bertram Vice President of EHS and Risk Management