Testimonial : Suez and the International roll-out of VR training

SUEZ 

Created 160 years ago, Suez is an international French company of 86,000 employees around the world. The Group, which favors the circular economy model, is present across the entire water management and waste recovery value chain: from the construction and operation of networks and infrastructure water, from collection, sorting and recovery to the production of renewable energy and new materials and the delivery of digital services. Its main target markets are agro-food, energy, oil & gas, chemicals & pharmaceuticals, and micro-electronics.

SUEZ's commitment to preserving the health and life of its employees, subcontractors and customers was strengthened in 2020, with the implementation of a business continuity plan in the context of the Covid-19 crisis. These had the dual objective of ensuring the continuity of essential services of water and the safety of employees in the face of the risk of a pandemic.

Suez's policy aims to achieve the goal of “Zero serious and fatal accidents”

At SUEZ all operational staff are trained in health and safety.

The group's values: to achieve the goal  of "Zero serious and fatal accidents", to create a fair and integrated Health Safety culture, strengthen mobilization around the well-being of everyone.*

43% of training hours are dedicated to health and safety*

6.94 : Group occupational accident frequency rate in 2019, is down 37% over the past 5 years**

nb: Veolia and SUEZ have signed a merger agreement and a Memorandum of Understanding with Meridiam - GIP - Caisse des Dépôts / CNP Assurances for the takeover of the new SUEZ.*

The challenge

Suez's goal is to achieve zero serious and fatal accidents by 2030 and to rely on trusted partners like Immersive Factory, to strengthen its safety culture.

Let’s come back to 2017 with LYDEC, a subsidiary of the SUEZ group located in Morocco. This subsidiary has developed training workshops including a large theoretical part and a large practical part, in particular thanks to the facilities at its campus in Casablanca. Despite these tools, LYDEC unfortunately suffered fatal accidents, whose cause was more related to bad behavior than a lack of knowledge.

Therefore, one of LYDEC's challenges was to raise its employees' awareness of the risks of accidents and to make them understand, "touch the finger", the consequences of risky behavior, in particular on the risks associated with electrical lockout. On this topic, LYDEC had a large number of employees to train on both low voltage and high voltage.

Given the challenges, the Moroccan and French management teams have decided to review the learning form for these occupational risks and to seek, in addition to the existing one, for a more effective model both in form and in substance. Thus, the innovative solutions of Immersive Factory has been implemented in the group with the objective of literally making learners live, virtually but realistically, the consequences of their errors in the action of logging, whether these errors are due to a lack of knowledge of the process or to inappropriate behavior. 

After a period of “test & learn” and a few other local initiatives, including another simulation on the risks linked to the coactivity carried out with the Polish subsidiary of the group, SUEZ has decided to deploy Immersive Factory solutions broadly and to implement the Virtual Reality (VR) in training programs in almost all countries.

"I had tested VR for soft skills within the Accenture firm, and at SUEZ I must admit that the benefit is obvious for technical training which requires moving in a particular work environment" Morgane Vidal

The invaluable added value of this new pedagogy associated with the ease of deployment and very positive market feedback have motivated the management team to deploy it internationally. To guarantee the success of the project, the group's roadmap had included the VR training completion in the Top management objectives, thus reinforcing the weight of health and safety in the performance balanced scorecards.

The solution with Immersive Factory

With the support of the SUEZ academy and the board's desire to make safety issues a key objective of SUEZ's strategy, EHS managers have organized themselves in order to structure the approach in 2020 and roll it out in 2021. The health crisis did not make it possible to deploy as quickly as planned, but this time greatly helped to mature the project in order to better support the local teams.

Scope of the deployment:

1300 people

100 VR headsets purchased

20 countries

70 health / safety trainers

To date (October 2021): 10 countries have deployed the virtual reality training solution

The key stages:

• Sign framework contracts with Immersive Factory at the start of 2020 and with Matts Digital
• Define a group catalog to pool efforts and help countries focus on fundamental exercises (awareness of “rules that save”)
• Invest in devices
• Train the trainers
• Test VR on pilot sites
• Integrate VR into the objectives of HSE directors to incentivize them on the percentage of people trained in VR

One of the breaks when deploying at the international level is that countries are not all at the same level of technological maturity and the integration of new forms of pedagogy such as virtual reality is not completed at the same speed in one country to another. 

To obtain good sponsorship, it is critical to adapt well to the level of need of the countries and to establish a very regular flow of information and best practices exchange.

The Suez Academy? Suez Academy provides all entities with training programs to understand new technologies, their usages and their impacts.

Success

With Immersive Factory Suez has built a trusted relationship, which is reflected in the quality of the exercises developed for SUEZ.

The SUEZ catalog with 6 modules co-designed with the group from 2017 to 2021 then 2 new ones in 2022 provides operational staff with an excellent training toolkit. The Immersive Factory catalog, with more than 60 exercises, complements the SUEZ workshops and covers other topics still related to health and safety. With this comprehensive offer, we are seeing strong support from HSE teams for VR training programs. Thanks to this content platform, Suez has the ability to manage, distribute, update modules and supply a fleet of headsets around the world.

For an international deployment, Morgane Vidal recommends this advices:

• Internal sponsorship
• The creation of a trainers network and a network of trainees
• A robust and multilingual platform for training on a global scale
• A content strategy: “the rules that save” then a choice of workshops and exercise selections created by Immersive Factory
• Customer references that reassure the network on the choice of service provider (IF)

“I confirm that having an immersive experience changes the outlook on HSE training greatly. Employees are more enthusiastic, they retain better, thanks to more engagement. During safety days, spectators learn as much by watching the person trained with the virtual reality headset. With VR, the experience is more than practical ... It is physical and face-to-face." Morgane Vidal

"Safety Always"

 At SUEZ, Safety is everywhere, all the time, with and for everyone.

“Each employee is concerned about the safety and well-being of their person and everyone, acts with ethics and integrity, respects diversity and acts to reduce inequalities." Extract from SUEZ's health and safety policy

“The Health and Safety of each of us is particularly important to me. This is an essential condition of our activities and a guarantee of quality for our customers. Let us all be committed, individually and collectively, to a SUEZ Health & Safety culture integrated into everything we do. With the members of EXCOM, I commit to monitoring the implementation of the Group's Health & Safety policy, so that together we preserve the lives and health of all." Bertrand Camus

*extract integrated report 2021

**source 2020 integrated report