Minto Group is a premier real estate company with a fully integrated real estate investment, development and management platform with branches in both Canada and the United States. Established in 1955, the Minto Group offers new homes and condos, apartment rentals, furnished suites, commercial space, and property and investment management services. The company is a two-time winner of the Building Industry and Land Development Association’s Green Builder of the Year award, four-time winner of EnerQuality’s Ontario Green Builder of the Year award, two-time winner of the Ontario Home Builder Association’s Home Builder of the Year award as well as the Environmental Excellence Award. The Minto Group was also named one of Canada’s Greenest Employers for 2019. The majority of Minto’s North American businesses are located in Ontario, predominantly in Ottawa and Toronto.
When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, governments across the world mandated organizations to conduct COVID-19 screening to protect workers, customers, and the public from the virus. Consequently, Minto started to do some research on potential software solutions and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers that would be able to assist them to effectively coordinate the screening process of people entering and leaving their various sites given their broad setup which includes real estate buildings, construction sites and offices. They came across an Ontario-based managed services provider (MSP), Stage2Data, that suggested Plan4Continuity’s COVID-19 pre-screening tool for workplaces with QR code integration to automate and streamline COVID-19 pre-screening at all Minto’s premises.
The challenge – Coordinating COVID-19 pre-screening across numerous construction and real estate sites
The one global challenge that has been present continuously throughout the pandemic is how to ensure a healthy workforce and protect clients, and visitors to the various Minto sites from contracting the virus. To achieve this, the World Health Organization recommended certain precautions such as daily fit-for-work screening to reduce exposure to and the spread of COVID-19.
The Minto Group presented an additional challenge: As mentioned, their operations and workforce are spread across various real estate buildings, construction sites, residential homes and traditional office buildings. Where the typical office building can have a single QR code at each entrance, which makes it fairly straightforward to screen and track people entering, this was not the case with Minto. Given the company’s multi-location and multi-site setup, it was particularly challenging to implement a seamless, automated pre-screening solution across their various premises. Nevertheless, Stage2Data, rose to the occasion and addressed the challenge head-on.
“During the onboarding process, we worked closely with Petrus Human and Stephan Pyott to iron out any issues and ensure everything was in place before we went live. They were knowledgeable, always responded quickly to any enquiries and once they assigned Gerard Rautenbach, their head of IT support, as our account manager, everything was pretty much seamless thereafter”
Stephanie Cameron, Director, Human Resources and Health and Safety of the Minto Group.
The solution – Stage2Data, launches Plan4Continuity’s Pre-screening Tool for
Workplaces
Before onboarding Stage2Data and implementing Plan4Continuity’s Pre-screening Tool, Minto used manual, paperbased pre-screening forms that all employees, contractors, visitors, and residents had to complete daily.
“Looking back at the time when we still had to coordinate manual pre-screening, it’s really like night and day. Previously we had to have every employee fill out a piece of paper every day regarding whether or not they were exhibiting symptoms. This posed several challenges such as where do we ultimately keep these forms and for how long must we keep them? Will the Ministry of Labor audit us on these forms and require a management report on the daily pre-screening conducted? There was of course also the additional risk of transmission of the coronavirus since paper forms inherently require touching. Now with Plan4Continuity there is zero-touch, everything is automated and it’s easy to run a report when needed. Plan4Continuity has been an absolute time saver for our managers and our business,” says Stephanie.
The Result – An automated and streamlined pre-screening solution across all verticals
Plan4Continuity’s Pre-screening Tool for Workplaces was implemented across all Minto’s sites in Ontario, Quebec, and Alberta. The SaaS solution not only saved time and automated and streamlined the entire manual pre-screening process but also ensured compliance with government regulations. In fact, the entire process was so successful that Minto still uses Plan4Continuity at all its locations, even though the restrictions have been lifted in these provinces.
Stage2Data created all the necessary plans for Minto which included approximately 100 people-plans and about 150 unique QR codes. Minto formed a committee to coordinate the people attached to each plan, the data of which was then sent to Stage2Data to upload to the Plan4Continuity platform. Further management sessions were scheduled to train key stakeholders to use the software and iron out any final customer journey details such as agreeing on the specific time to send the automated reminders since Minto’s workforce work at different time intervals. Minto can now automate communication to its entire workforce across all its sites via email or mobile phone and send out a real-time broadcast to keep the relevant parties updated, while the built-in daily report generates documented compliance with government screening requirements.
“We are extremely excited to start testing the other emergency response plans and capabilities of Plan4Continuity. It feels like we haven’t even skimmed the surface and we are looking forward to exploring and utilizing these plans especially with our remote workforce” says Stephanie.
