Innovative interactive training program, "The Road to Safety," is a key element in RSC's overall initiative to minimize the company's OSHA incident rate.

Chicago, IL, December 9, 2009 – An innovative interactive training program designed and developed by Quicksilver Associates is contributing to an impressive industrial safety record at RSC Equipment Rental, one of North America’s largest rental providers. The number of reportable safety incidents at the company continues to trend down.

The program, The Road to Safety, is mandatory and has been completed by every RSC employee in North America. Using techniques familiar in online gaming, users navigate through a typical RSC facility and are challenged to identify safety hazards. Their overall score for the course partly reflects how many hazards they identify. Learning objectives are reinforced by on-screen guides who provide coaching and additional information, and by integrated testing.

RSC’s goal for its overall safety program is “no accidents.” The company is doing well, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) incident rate dropped 33% in 2008 over 2007. As of August 2009, RSC’s OSHA rate stood at 2.3, compared to a 5.8 rating at the start of its Delivering Safety First campaign in 2006.

 “The Road to Safety has helped us advance our safety goals, and continue building our safety culture,” said Ken Colonna, RSC’s Director of Safety. “It forces every person in the company to visually identify the common and not so common safety risks, and just as important, to be very clear about how they can help prevent them.”

The program is structured so that the user must either identify or review every safety risk that it illustrates. As employees proceed through the program their performance is continuously recorded by the company’s learning management system.

 “We set out to establish a new benchmark for safety training in our industry,” said Colonna, “and to demonstrate our safety commitment to our customers and employees. I think we’ve achieved that. The bonus is that it’s a very engaging program that has been well received. The scoring promotes friendly competition, which also seems to have reinforced the learning.”

To learn more about The Road to Safety and the underlying training platform, please visit www.quicksilvernow.com/InteractiveTraining.

About Quicksilver Associates, Inc.
Quicksilver Associates, Inc., a creative communications company based in Chicago, Illinois, designs, develops and delivers integrated communications solutions for corporations and organizations. Founded in 1976, we have partnered with hundreds of businesses, helping them to use the power of communications to more effectively connect with their important target audiences and achieve their business goals.

More information about our solutions and work history is available at www.quicksilvernow.com.

Quicksilver is a certified Women’s Business Enterprise.

About RSC Equipment Rental, Inc.
RSC Equipment Rental, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, is one of the largest equipment rental providers in North America, servicing the industrial, maintenance and non-residential construction markets with an original equipment fleet cost of $2.4 billion. RSC offers superior levels of equipment availability, reliability and 24x7 service to customers through an integrated network of 464 branch locations across 40 states in the United States and three provinces in Western Canada. Customer solutions to improve efficiency and reduce cost include the proprietary Total Control® rental management software, Mobile Tool Rooms™ and on-site rental locations. With 4,300 employees committed to safety and sustainability, RSC delivers the best value and industry-leading customer service. All information is as of September 30, 2009. Additional information about RSC is available at www.RSCrental.com.

For more information, contact:  

Michael O’Brien
(312) 943-7622 x117
mobrien@quicksilvernow.com

Heather Schlichting
(480) 905-3341
heather.schlichting@rscrental.com

Per Ohstrom
(480) 281-6934
per.ohstrom@rscrental.com

It isn’t often that we can directly link the business communications we create to hard metrics that benefit our clients. Often the best measurement we can get is the client’s qualitative assessment about the success of a meeting or an interactive component. And we feel appreciated when the holiday basket arrives in December, along with the client’s warm wishes.

But here’s one outcome that is objectively a win. RSC Equipment Rental, for whom we created an interactive safety training program (The Road to Safety) last year, has recorded a 34-percent reduction in its OSHA Incident Rate (OIR) after running the program for a year.

RSC works in the construction, industrial/petrochemical and manufacturing sectors, and it maintains numerous safety initiatives as part of a strong safety culture. So one program can hardly lay claim to all the credit for this result. However, the company’s Safety Director has no doubt that the contribution has been significant.

Every employee in the company, about 5,500 people, has completed this Flash-based interactive training. It’s mandatory for all new hires at the 470-plus locations in the U.S. and Canada. So the opportunity was there for this rich-media elearning program to have a real impact.

These are preliminary results. We’ll be watching with interest as more come in.

The evolution of Flash and Actionscript have completely changed the landscape for developing interactive training, whether the training is online or installed on a local machine.

Designers and developers now turn to Flash for a wide variety of uses–from animations, presentations, and banner ads to websites and games. Training is a natural addition to the list. Designers have embraced Flash because it enables them to make training much more visually appealing–the design possibilities are virtually limitless. Developers like the dynamic Flash/Actionscript duo for training applications because it enables them to program and unleash powerful, event-based, user-driven scenarios–something that originally required a medium-level programming language like C++.

All that users need to access the training product is the ubiquitous Flash Player. In mature markets like the United States, 99 percent of Internet-enabled computers have Flash Player installed. Flash Player has the advantage of being very ‘lightweight’–meaning that rich media content requires little effort from your pc to manage and display. Typical users no longer see their devices struggle to handle animations and video files–and based on their exposure to the Web and to interactive games, they are increasingly likely to expect these media types to be used for training.

Actionscript is the programming language for Flash. It is related to Javascript, which is commonly used by Web developers to program access to objects within other applications. Actionscript is object-oriented as well, which helps when you are developing a training curriculum that reuses common elements. By communicating through a middleman like XML or PHP, for example, Actionscript can converse with databases, applications, and other Flash files. As a result, it is now possible in Flash to track a trainee’s actions (i.e., their clickstream), trigger an event (e.g., pass data to a training database or display new graphics in response to trainee choices), or make calculations (e.g., assign a score to a trainee for a specific action).

That’s why Flash is now in wide use to create interactive, scenario-based training–because it combines visually rich animations and graphics with computations, transactions and the ability to generate reports.

Bill Talsma is a Designer and Flash Animator with Quicksilver Associates and was the lead Flash designer for RSC Equipment Rental's interactive training.