Facility Safety Management

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Value of an Agile CMS
Risk Management for Environment Health & Safety
(Excerpted from an Executive White Paper for Environmental Support Solutions)
BY JILL BARSON GILBERT AND ROBERT JOHNSON

Environmental health and safety compliance is not optional for the regulated community, which is well aware of the serious consequences of noncompliance with the rules, regulations, policies and procedures that govern their operation.

Unfortunately, achieving and/or assuring compliance can be a tremendous challenge. A single facility can be responsible for meeting thousands to hundreds of thousands of discrete requirements each year. In addition, compliance management often touches nearly all aspects of an enterprise.

Businesses should seek powerful, flexible information technology (IT) solutions to automate their compliance. Business and regulatory pressures, as well as the sheer volume of data, are compelling reasons for any large organization to seek an Environmental, Health & Safety management information system (EMIS) for compliance.

The centerpiece of a capable EMIS should be an “Agile” Compliance Management System, which supports continuous improvement within an organization. They also help push compliance tasks to the operational level, enabling staff to fulfill their compliance responsibilities in the course of their regular jobs and assuring that those tasks are completed.

An effective capable EMIS is a critical part of the continuous improvement process. Many organizations have adopted environmental management systems in the form of ISO 14001, the American Chemistry Council’s Responsible Care Management System, and other standards or systems. These organizations must reach a certain level of maturity before they can address continuous improvement. The Software engineering Institute developed the Capability Maturity Model to describe software development.

Today referred to as CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration), this model applies continuous growth and development to different disciplines.

For an organization to become capable, it must institutionalize its processes and ingrain them in day-to-day work. The CMMI uses five levels to grade the maturity of organizations:

1. Initial: Incomplete;

2. Managed: Repeatable, focus on project management;

3. Defined: Focus on engineering processes;

4. Quantitatively Managed: Focus on product and process quality;

5. Optimizing: Focus on continuous improvement.

These levels apply just as easily to EH&S compliance and task management as they do to IT and human resources. Agile processes originated in the software industry in Japan in the late 1990s. While the tem initially applied to software development, it has been applied in other business areas, and this report extends the agile model to Compliance Management Systems designed specifically for Environmental, Health & Safety.

An agile CMS should exhibit 10 characteristics: Modular, iterative, timebound, economical, adaptive incremental, convergent, people-oriented, collaborative and complementary.1 Modular: Agile systems allow users to employ part or all of the software application to meet their business needs. Users can implement, or “plug in” additional features and functionality as needed. The software modules share common elements, so that users benefit from the system’s framework.

Iterative: Agile systems are developed by a procedure in which repetition of a sequence of operations yields results successively closer to a desired result. This allows for continuous improvement.

Time-Bound: Agile systems make things happen within a defined time constraint. They can deliver a solution quickly, in Internet time – in weeks, not in months or years. Once implemented, these systems deliver data in real-time or near time to provide the greatest value.

Economical: Agile systems are designed to be affordable, choosing simplicity over complexity to solve a given problem. They are economical from a cost perspective, with clear benefits for dollars spent. This does not mean that the system is inexpensive.

Adaptive: Agile systems streamline business processes, but adapt to business processes rather than completely changing them, in other words, systems standardize business processes and add a degree of structure, but also adapt to changes in the business.

Incremental: Agile systems are incremental in both their development and implementation.

This allows the solutions to be developed to address customer needs, market drivers and company vision. It also allows staged or phased adoption vs. “big bang” implementation, to show early value as well as to minimize risks to the end-user organization.

Convergent: Agile systems can use several technologies, such as Web services, portals, data warehousing, e-mail, executive decision support tools and data dashboards, to provide a seamless solution. Agile systems also join convergent information sources – operations data, regulatory data, public information sources, metrics and key performance indicators.

People-oriented: Agile systems provide a user-friendly interface and are easy to navigate. They elevate staff productivity rather than complicating day to-day tasks. Their business processes are logical to the casual user, mirroring the real world. You’ll know when your process is right when it doesn’t take extraordinary people to do ordinary tasks.

Collaborative: Agile EMIS foster collaboration by:

• Improving business processes;

• Facilitating distributed teamwork;

• Distributing data entry throughout the company, allowing entry where data originate, often in operations;

• Automating work flows, bringing together many parties;

• Serving as a central data repository, allowing many people to share data, enhancing the corporate knowledge base;

• Providing more accurate, real-time, consistent information;

• Reducing or eliminating duplicate data entry.

Complementary: Agile systems have complementary elements that comprise the solution. These elements include integrate modules. They also include tools that harmonize with the business functionality, such as wizards, data manipulation tools and decision support tools.

Risk Management

Agile CMS can provide a number of direct or “hard” benefits improving the organization’s ability to manage risk and provide a solid return on investment (ROI).

Agile CMS help organizations to manage risks. We accept risk every day, according to an organization’s risk tolerance level. What is risk? Risk refers to the uncertainty that surrounds future events and outcomes. It is the expression of the likelihood and impact of an event with the potential to influence the achievement of an organization’s objectives.

For safety professionals, risk management means reducing accidents and injuries. However, from a broader perspective, risk management is a systematic approach to setting the best course of action in the face of uncertainty by identifying, assessing, understanding, acting on and communicating risk issues.

In addition, integrated risk management is a continuous, proactive and systematic process to understand, manage and communicate risk from an organization-wide perspective.

For IT solutions, risk management involves reducing the variability of one’s ROI for the same return. With an EMIS, the hope is to reduce the variability in the return on the EMIS investment – lower compliance costs, fewer violations and better operational performance.

Many commercial EH&S management information systems are available on the market. So many that it is confusing unless you are intimately familiar with software offerings and their capabilities.

What is a capable system, and how can it help you to address your compliance needs, at the same time managing risks and showing benefits to you enterprise?

Before embarking upon an EH&S compliance initiative, first, understand the problem(s) to be solved. Get your arms around the problem – perhaps simply the need to centralize and share task calendars or something much more. Involve key stakeholders, document your needs and set scope boundaries. FSM

Robert Johnson is president and CEO and Jill Barson Gilbert is president and founder of Lexicon Systems, LLC. She is past VP of the Air & Waste Management Association and a thought leader on EH&S management information systems. For more information, go to www.lexicon-systems.com. ESS, a provider of integrated software and services for EH&S Crisis Management. Its Essential Suite software helps enterprise-level users comply with international, federal, state and local regulations and industry standards. They can be reached at www.ess-home.com or 800.999.5009.

1 Borrowed from Randy, Miller, The Dynamics of Agile Software Processes, Part I: Characteristics, Borland Developer Network, Revised July 15, 2003 (http://bdn.borland.com/article/0,1410,2972600.html).