Visibility in EHS

Post written by Peter T., a Management Consultant at Ideaca. Read more on his blog: Visibility.

You might ask yourself, why the focus on Environment, Health & Safety (EHS)? Well, besides the fact that there is a lot of attention on this specific operational area, I feel the industry as a whole has created such a buzz about the benefits of an effective EHS Management System (EHSMS), that organizations are looking at implementing an EHSMS without clearly thinking about the overall value drivers for doing this.

While operationally most organizations have varying EHS needs, the following requirements are often the same: ensuring that they minimize operational risks, sustain and improve the safety record of the workplace, maintain and advance environmental management efficiency, and comply with regulatory mandates. Meeting these requirements however involves designing cohesive EHS processes, a systems integration approach, cooperation across the enterprise, the ability to consolidate information, and a supportive management team that will ensure roadblocks are eliminated or minimized. In essence, a true EHS Management System is beneficial.

However, there are significant challenges that exist when it comes to designing an effective and complete EHS solution. These core challenges are related to data and the specific industry sector. The way data is being managed, collected and utilized is an important component. A common complaint is that there is too much data and not enough information. Individuals seem to be spending more time organizing and finding data than analyzing it. In most cases data management techniques within organizations are not integrated, coming in various forms such as paper files, countless reports, and spreadsheets.

By the time data comes into the operation it is already out of date and not current. It often takes more time to reinterpret and merge current data into existing reports than to redo all the reports over again. Also, tedious ways of doing things and the lack of resources needed to truly re-engineer business processes leaves an operational gap with no big picture of organizational conditions. Departments often work in silos, data and knowledge is not shared across the organization, which leads to inconsistent EHS event handling. These business process, technology and data-specific challenges are further magnified by additional industry related conditions that usually prevent already resource drained organizations from engaging in optimization and improvement initiatives.

So with all these challenges, how do you setup an effective EHS Management System? The key is to identify the core business value drivers of the organization, and ensure that all your EHS initiatives drive to meet these values. These tangible business values can include: increase revenue, decrease costs, operational efficiencies, increase capacity, etc. Intangible value drivers however are significantly harder to prove and require a larger effort to gauge their business value.  These include: expertise, company reputation, employee morale, compliance risk, etc. It is not hard to address a tangible profitability business value.  The value gained from the purchase of a new piece of equipment that will improve operations can easily be determined. Reputation or compliance risks, however, are important non-tangible value drivers. A non-compliance incident can easily push profitability value initiatives to the bottom of the list.

By implementing an effective EHSMS, we can easily monitor and measure all intangible value drivers identified.