Chemical Manufacturers Rely On Plateau 4 LMS To Comply With New Regulations, Unify Learning Systems

A Critical Asset at Plants With High Training Demands, Plateau LMS Also Meets the Enterprise-Scale Needs of Expanding Chemical Companies

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA - March 5, 2003 Plateau Systems, a provider of enterprise software that manages all of an organization's learning and knowledge, today announced that the Plateau Learning Management System (LMS) has been successfully implemented at nearly a dozen chemical manufacturing companies that must comply with new federal regulations relating to training and the maintenance of records on the skills and certifications of their employees. Several of these companies have consolidated all of their learning initiatives at numerous divisions onto Plateau 4 LMS, which provides a scalable, Web-based platform to manage online and classroom learning in compliance with federal regulations.

Because of the safety risks to employees and the environment when dealing with toxic or hazardous chemicals, chemical manufacturers are subject to hundreds of rules from federal agencies, including the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Transportation and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

A regulation from the FDA, known as Q7A, establishes Good Manufacturing Practices on the management of training and training records for chemical manufacturers who supply Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) to drug companies. Plateau's LMS has helped more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies internally validate their training efforts with similar GMP regulations by providing secure, time-stamped audit trails of all training events and training revisions. Chemical manufacturers who must comply with Q7A also are using the LMS to ensure that all employees are up to date with their training in compliance with the regulation.

Additionally, chemical manufacturers are using Plateau 4 LMS to comply with other federal regulations, including OSHA's 29 CFR 1910.119. Among the many aspects of OSHA119, training delivery and recordkeeping is specifically dictated. For the companies that manage any of the more than 130 hazardous chemicals that present a potential for a catastrophic event, they must follow a detailed Process Safety Management scheme with mandatory elements on training, training documentation, operating procedures, change management and audit compliance. All of these components have been automated or delivered at plants that use Plateau LMS, at corporations including Akzo Nobel, Algroup Lonza, DeGussa AG, Georgia Gulf Corp., and others.

Plateau 4 LMS has been widely adopted throughout many regulated industries in large part because of its Qualification Management scheme, which automatically assigns tasks, requirements and deadlines to thousands of individual employees based on their job position. These qualifications can include any requirement a company wants to associate with that job or contractor: specific tasks and policies, documents, courses, emergency procedures, assessments, or on-the-job training. Plateau 4 LMS schedules, manages and records all Web-based and classroom training related to these tasks. The LMS automatically alerts affected workers by email when new training is due or procedures change, and provides audit trails so that plant inspectors can be given a comprehensive view of the training.

While many niche software providers focus on qualifications at chemical plants, their systems frequently become inadequate when faced with the task of unifying training operations across a company with multiple plants, or a company facing industry consolidation. An enterprise-class LMS is engineered to manage all Web-based and classroom training across multiple divisions and business units.

Increasingly we're seeing that large chemical manufacturers don't want to have to coordinate different learning systems at every subsidiary or facility they operate, said Brad Cooper, Plateau's senior vice president. With a central enterprise LMS, an employee's training history automatically follows them no matter where they go or what position they take in the company. Plateau LMS consolidates different sources of data, scaling up to hundreds of thousands of users around the world, so there is a consistency of record-keeping throughout the enterprise.

About Plateau: Plateau's enterprise-class software manages all of an organization's learning and knowledge on one scalable platform. Plateau 4 Learning Management System (LMS) is built on Web-based J2EE/EJB architecture, and is the engine behind the largest e-Learning initiatives in the corporate, non-profit and government markets. Plateau 4 LMS automates the management and delivery of online and classroom learning, organizational knowledge and competencies for clients including the American Red Cross, Motorola, Union Pacific and the U.S. Air Force. Plateau is listed as a leader in LMS evaluations from Gartner Inc. and META Group. The company is headquartered in Arlington, VA. For more information, please visit www.plateau.com.

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