Simon Jacobson: Environmental compliance: a foundation for sustainability
By Simon Jacobson -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 10/1/2007 12:00:00 AM
Implementing a consistent environmental framework is a large undertaking that still doesn't have a standardized blueprint or implementation methodology that ERP or some supply chain-facing projects have.
AMR Research's ongoing look at environmental health & safety (EH&S) brings to light three steps companies can execute on to further integrate EH&S compliance efforts with other business processes.
Step one: Consolidate disparate EH&S applications and systems to a single instance.
Companies that have been successful in their environmental compliance endeavors have embraced the concept of a standardized application or single global instance that spans multiple regions—and the varied local, regional, and international policies, procedures, and distributed assets—to ensure endless fluidity in environmental regulations. Essential to the success of this strategy is having technology flexible enough to accommodate diverse global and local requirements of the business.
The broad spectrum of functionality that environmental compliance requires demands an ERP application that can be extended to real-time environmental data models. A single instance of EH&S functionality drives a common task and incident management framework with automatic escalations and a standardized auditing process.
Step two: Employ Enterprise 2.0 and Manufacturing 2.0 constructs within the environmental framework.
With many companies relying on loosely cobbled frameworks of legacy applications at their manufacturing and distribution sites, installing an EH&S platform that slots between these multiple systems is a beneficial approach. The platform will act as a conduit or information broker presenting the high-level metrics to the corporate standardized systems, and will provide the ability to leverage productive and proven infrastructure. Harvesting data from the duplicity of production and asset management systems into a single EH&S framework or application instance requires both Enterprise 2.0 and Manufacturing 2.0 thinking.
Manufacturing 2.0 includes operations event/activity monitoring, operations process management, operations intelligence, and something that few want to think about: Manufacturing MDM.
Emerging Enterprise 2.0 capabilities provide for effective search and discovery and links to information to best facilitate proliferation of best practices, and plug the looming brain drain that comes with an aging workforce.
Step three: Integrate the environmental framework with a governance risk and compliance (GRC) framework.
EH&S software on a single instance centralizes metrics collection and tracking—even at its most basic level facilitating simple examinations of open incidents and comparisons of detection-to-correction cycle times for adverse-event detection.
Tracking performance to standards helps companies migrate their overall GRC maturity by contributing to a set of protocols for managing risk across the entire organization. The proliferation of a single environmental instance lends visibility into multiple priorities—where one group's hot risk exposure may pale in comparison to another. In turn, companies are better equipped to make the tough call of which risks to address and which to accept.
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