The Challenge
In a complex global business environment, improving performance and assuring compliance with all Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) obligations, commitments and constraints is a challenge. Moreover, social-environmental management has earned increasing interest among organizations that want to establish an ethical and transparent relationship with all interested parties – shareholders, customers, community, suppliers and employees.
While the EHS needs will vary from one organization to the next, the primary objective is often the same – to reduce overall risk, comply with state and federal regulations, and enable the company to operate efficiently while maintaining a safe and environmentally healthy workplace. Standards and initiatives such as ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 serve as the framework that enables companies to comply with all environmental, health, and safety standards.
The Solution
QI Solutions EHSM is a software for environmental, health and safety management that facilitates the complete and closed-loop management of the EHS program, drastically reducing the risk of health and safety incidents and strengthening compliance with environmental regulations and labor laws. The solution helps organizations maintain compliance and efficiently manage and track key processes based on organizational SOPs, local, national and international government regulations, and compliance guidelines such as ISO 14001, ISO 45001 and similar standards for environmental, health and safety management.
The complete set of capabilities offered by QI Solutions EHSM for driving continuous improvement includes incident management and investigations, environmental management, audits and inspections, management of change (MOC), proactive measures and risk management, corrective and preventive action, waste management (treatment, storage, and disposal requirements), and compliance management. With the help of an integrated and advanced framework, these processes can be simplified and strengthened to improve the performance of the EHS program.
QI Solutions EHSM software provides a flexible framework to streamline the creation and management of environmental policies and procedures as well as codes of conduct. It supports policy documentation, change management, awareness, training management, and accountability. The solution also helps rules and policies to be effectively communicated across the enterprise.
Powerful analytics and executive dashboards provide real-time visibility into key process indicators, while alerts and notifications ensure prompt response, reducing the potential risk of safety incidents. The software also enables organizations to integrate environmental, health and safety compliance functions into their corporate and business processes levels in an organized and systematic way.
Environment, Health and Safety Management EHSM
Main Benefits
Reduce the time and resources that are involved in meeting compliance requirements.
Generate awareness regarding regulatory requirements within the organization.
Maintain a complete audit history of all activities.
Reduce costs related to fines and penalties due to disregard of legal issues.
Reduce waste, including wasted raw materials, utility waste and waste disposal costs.
Promote accurate identification of regulatory requirements and issues affecting management system performance.
Promote continuous improvement in EHS performance.
Engage the workforce and identify and act on hazards before they impact safety.
Protect asset integrity and optimize production by reducing unplanned downtime and outages.
Incorporate risk management into daily operations with integrated business processes and shared data and workflows
Repositories of legal requirements
Objectives & target monitoring
Risks & impacts monitoring
Incident report & investigation
Audit management
Waste control
Features
RISK MANAGEMENT: Centralized risk/hazard analyses, identifying environmental and safety risks, and supporting a complete risk management program.
INCIDENTS: Streamlined and automated management of work-related, environmental and property incidents.
KEY PERFORMANCE MONITORING: Monitoring and evaluation of performance against compliance obligations, operational risks and key performance metrics.
ACTION PLANS: Effectively create action plans, track completion, manage reminders, ensure follow-up and create reports.
TRAINING MANAGEMENT: Training management system aligned with company policies and regulatory requirements.
From 1850 to around 1975, the sustainable competitive advantage of industrial organizations was related exclusively to the benefit of economies of scale and scope, rapid allocation of technology, fixed assets and excellence in the management of financial assets and liabilities in an economy dominated by tangible assets. This economy was based solely on financial indicators for performance management, no longer applicable today because organizations have transferred their assets to tangible assets.
For Kaplan and Norton (1997), financial measures are designed to compare previous periods based on internal standards of performance. While such measures may present this information in a fairly consistent fashion, the financial outlook is no longer able to predict the future and also prevents the first signs of relationship problems, quality and new opportunities. This is because the speed with which information technology is evolving prompts major changes that demand a larger amount of information and new skills to manage organizational processes in order to guarantee competitive advantages in terms of making operational and strategic decisions on time.
Experts call attention to the fact that, in the current scenario, the use of traditional financial measures alone is no longer appropriate, since the probability of failure is too high. This leads organizations to develop new methods and tools for supporting the measurement of overall performance, balancing not only the tangible assets, but also the intangible ones that will assist with short and long term decisions.
In this sense, QI Solutions EHSM offers a wide range of natively integrated tools (components) to fully assist all phases of management process, supporting performance management, balance between tangible and intangible assets, transparency of processes and improvement of stakeholder confidence, with the following main advantages
- Lowered TCO through increased reliability and scalability leading to greater administrative productivity.
- Increased user productivity with the ability to communicate whenever and wherever needed with collaboration tools.
- Streamlined solution operations and reduced risk by leveraging a full range of capabilities.
- Compliance with major regulations.
- Reduced ongoing costs with flexible financing and support options.
- Allows for modular and incremental implementation, with worldwide services and support.
Annual Savings
- Reduction of costs related to EHS risks.
- Reduction of costs related to fines and penalties due to the disregard of legal issues.
- Reduction of general expenses to complete activities demanded by applicable norms.
- Reduction of management system costs.
- Elimination of delays and inefficiencies that usually occur in manual activities.
- Collaboration skill enhancement through real-time access to information.
- Increased efficiency in maintenance system planning and activities.
- Optimization of financial resources invested in management programs.
Investment
- The investment in SoftExpert EHSM will depend on the business unit size and implementation approach.
Return on Investment (%)
- (((Total Annual Savings x n years) – Initial Investment) / Initial Investment) x 100.
Payback Period (years)
- Initial Investment / Total Annual Savings.
- Increases productivity due to electronic management of the content-content creation, revision, approval, distribution, and cycle time improved as only the newest version is available.
- Saves time by centrally managing the versions for the content.
- Saves IT resources by having the content located and stored once (plus versions) in a central repository.
- Eliminates personal electronic and hard copies spread throughout the business unit and company.
- Provides physical resources reduction as “paper” is no longer printed, marked up, and multiple version copies are filed.
- Increases customer satisfaction leads to increase in customer retention rate, reputation, market share and revenue.
- Improves regulatory compliance by integrating compliance management capabilities into current business processes.
- Reduces paper work and paper needed to print out reports, due to customized views and the comprehensive dashboard.
- Reduces project start-up time, shortens learning curve for project team members and saves time, once the processes, procedures and templates of documents are created and reused.