If you asked me a year ago what MSHA meant, you would have been met by a playful ASCII shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . What? You don’t know either? Well, i’m not going to tell you. Not yet anyway.
Little did anyone know that when Mark and Kim Savit walked through the door of 303 Software in early 2019, we would not only bring the Savit’s vision into reality, we would eventually start a company together.
303 Software and the Savits would solve a problem that the Mining industry has yet been able to crack.
It began with a eureka moment that we had the right convergence of skills in the room. Mark has 40+ years in the mining industry, from being a Miner Rescue Trainer in the early days to becoming one of the top mining compliance attorneys in the country and a regular speaker at mining conferences. Kim has a storied career in the federal government serving on several international posts. Oh, and it’s a family affair. Their sons are mining experts in both compliance processes and analytics.
Have you googled MSHA yet? Or were you already in the know? The Mining Safety & Health Administration is the federal body under the Department of Labor that enforces regulations and helps keep miners safe. Like OSHA, but specific to mining.
The alignment of the stars is about to get downright spooky. 303 Software already had depth of experience in building compliant applications for clients operating in regulated industries. We also have a background in designing and building search-based solutions, including core components like NLP (Natural Language Processing) and the search engine itself. Software development and experience runs deep at 303 Software. And never underestimate the power if grit. Sometimes we thrive by it, sometimes we hang on by it.
Improving the compliance landscape for the mining industry also unexpectedly fit with another part of the 303 Software software. To seek out and build projects and products that have a positive environmental impact.
The problem we would solve is making sense of those regulations for mine operators in a way they never thought possible. It goes beyond understanding and visualizing the relationships between the law, the regulations and the guidance policies. It couples that with an ever-growing set of insights and facts that represent the tribal knowledge in mining. Mine operators constantly have questions and compliance problems to solve, often in conjunction to inspections, citations and implementing safety plans. MSHAwise provides the search experience that lets them work quickly. Like having a gaggle of experts and peers standing somewhat close, but not invading your personal space. One then yells, “Hey Frank! I see you’re looking for help on berms and guardrails. First you have to tie the reg to the program policy manual. And you know what they really mean in this paragraph here? Have a seat.”
Fast-forward over the planning and through the build and we arrive at today, MVP (Minimum Viable Product) launched and smack in the middle of our Beta window. The focus now turns to growing adoption, the invaluable user feedback loop, and evolving the platform with features that multiply the value.
If this platform we’ve built works for mining compliance, I wonder if it could be useful to other industries 😉 ….Stay tuned.
