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Celebrating Innovation Excellence: Introducing the Winners of Tomlinson Group’s Annual Awards Program

In a remarkable display of creativity, dedication, and forward-thinking, Tomlinson is thrilled to announce the winners of our highly anticipated annual Innovation Awards Program. This prestigious recognition honors individuals and teams who have demonstrated exceptional ingenuity, problem-solving skills, and a commitment to driving positive change within our organization.

The People’s Choice Award

The People’s Choice award represents innovative ideas that are difficult to evaluate on the basis of the financial implications or value of the idea. The winner of this award is chosen by a web based digital survey and the most popular idea wins. Innovation ideas that do not meet the criteria for the Game Changer, Ground Breaker or MacGyver award are entered into the web based digital survey. This award allows all Tomlinson employees to submit their choice for the best innovation.

This year, the Sanitizer Slasher by Yousef Al-Oqbi was voted the People’s Choice! The “Slasher ” took the labour intensive task of draining expired hand sanitizer bottles from 18 hours per skid to less than 1 hour per skid by using their industrial shredding machine. It allows us the opportunity to get more product destruction work at higher margins.

The MacGyver Award

The MacGyver award represents thinking on your feet. Solutions to problems that only exist on a specific project. Considered continuous improvement and a process that cannot be duplicated or reproduced. This award is given to the team who is resourceful to fix things and creative thinking has helped to make a project successful. The criteria for this award is met by implementing a process, system or tool that is unlikely to be duplicated or used elsewhere in the company.

The Skateboard pump out, designed by Dan Lapenskie, is a perfect example of this ingenuity. During a project, a creative solution was devised to pump water out from a 30-degree angled 600mm upslope riser over 100ft long without the ability to dig due to liners. By attaching a 3″ pump to a skateboard with outriggers to maintain stability, the task was efficiently completed and saving labor over the course of several months.

The Ground Breaker Award

The Ground Breaker award represents implementation of an innovative idea, which may be used more than once. The idea may be used in multiple business units. The submission of this innovation must demonstrate the financial value. The team identifies, implements and communicates the idea to other business units that may benefit from the idea. This award recognizes teams who strive to find new and improved ways of conducting business at Tomlinson.

Craig Stadnyk’s innovation stood out above the rest to win this year’s Ground Breaker Award.  In his free moments, he designed a Microsoft Power BI dashboard hosted on Tomlinson’s SharePoint page that consolidates budget and cost data from SharePoint, schedule data from Primavera P6, and project information from the Tomlinson Infrastructure SharePoint project list. It enhances the previous siloed processes of budget/cost and schedule reporting by combining them into a single dashboard with features for easy data analysis and further potential capabilities.

As we celebrate the remarkable achievements of our award winners, we are reminded of the power of innovation to drive progress, inspire change, and propel our organization towards a brighter future. Their dedication, passion, and inventive spirit embody the core values of Growth, Driven, and Committed that define who we are as a company.

Please join us in congratulating our deserving winners for their outstanding contributions and for exemplifying the spirit of innovation that continues to propel Tomlinson to new heights of success.