Companies large and small are under increased pressure to improve their business value and EHS performance. Here are 10 guiding principles that can help.
Pressures to improve business value and EHS performance stem from such factors as intensified marketplace competition, expanded expectations for shareholder return, technological change, and the introduction of management practices emphasizing quality improvement and cost reduction.
Today, we’ll present the first 5 of 10 guiding principles for improving business value and EHS performance. Tomorrow, we’ll fill you in on the rest.
1. Know Your Company’s Processes
In business, processes intertwine in complex ways to provide products and services. Your company’s processes ultimately lead to its success or failure. The challenge for anyone wanting to ensure that the final result is successful is to find a way to analyze those processes.
Process mapping is a powerful tool that allows the reviewers to get a good understanding of the process, effectively find ways for that process to become more effective, and ensure that business value is being provided to the stakeholders.
Hierarchical process mapping can help a team of people understand how the process works and allow the team to explain the information to management and workers alike. Unlike the other process diagramming techniques, it has a simplified structure—never allowing more than six objects on a page.
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2. Everything Is Connected to Everything Else
Hierarchical process mapping provides employees with an overall view of how their work adds business value and how they are part of the team responsible for the company’s product or service.
The holistic approach allows them to see where their work comes from (upstream) and they can see the work steps that lead to the products (downstream). They can see why they are doing what they do. Eventually, this should lead to a final benefit to the customer.
Hierarchical process maps often provide the first time employees actually understand why they are doing the work they do. It helps them understand why a bothersome statistic they have to generate is important to a report that drives future customer transactions. It also helps them see the activities that influence their safety on the job and what they might do to affect the environment in an adverse way.
In your operations, processes are constantly interacting with other supporting processes. For example, say the water is purified in a de-ionization system in order to be used as a rinse in the main process. Both operations use resources and create wastes. Both operations are subject to EHS requirements. Too often process analysis is done in a vacuum and does not consider how these processes interrelate.
3. Prevention Is More Effective Than Control
EHS regulations and methodologies have always stressed the use of "controls" instead of at-the-source prevention. These controls include such things as machine guards, fume incinerators, wastewater pretreatment devices, and fall protection. Often they refer to these add-on controls as "prevention." This is quite misleading!
These controls cost money that does not add value to the process. Furthermore, these controls need to be inspected, maintained, documented, and reported on. Many controls (e.g., wastewater and air pollution controls) require additional energy to operate, consume other valuable resources, and create their own wastestreams.
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No company is in compliance with every regulation all of the time. Your company is always at risk of being found in violation of a compliance requirement. A good regulatory inspector having a bad day can find noncompliance examples in every case. By changing the process to avoid the very need for compliance, it is not possible to be found to be out of compliance!
But changing the process is exactly what all the EHS regulations sought to avoid when they were written. An investment in the process (i.e., making it more agile or productive) is a much better investment than spending money on a control that will not only fail to add business value but will also put you at constant risk that it may fail, causing production disruption.
4. Focus on the Processes
In any organization a certain amount of "turf" is protected by each functional manager. Each of these professionals and their employees gets their recognition based on the results of initiatives in their own silo. They are not judged on upstream and downstream consequences of their work.
A systems approach uses quality management tools to help "de-personalize" the team activity. By focusing on the process, all attention is given to fix what may be broken or improve what could be made better. Because this work is done in a systems framework, everyone can see how the activity will potentially affect them.
5. Use Quality Management as the Improvement Language
MBAs learn to use quality management tools. Management uses quality management tools to help operations meet the needs of their customers.
Many management initiatives (e.g., ISO 9000 quality management, Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, and Operational Excellence) also use quality management tools. The basis of the ISO 14001, OHSAS 18001, and other similar EHS management systems use the PDCA (plan, do, check, act) cycle—another quality management method. So quality management philosophy pervades many organizations.
For myriad reasons, EHS professionals are not as familiar with the use of quality management tools and methodologies. Many benefits can be realized from all process improvement programs using the same set of quality management tools.
Join us tomorrow for the final 5 guiding principles for improving business value and EHS performance.