Environmental Health and Safety- How Enterprise Applications Can Play A Role?
The reason for investing in Environmental Health and Safety [EH&S] are many. It can range from being the "coolest" thing to do in order to show case the social consciousness of the company to real, local, regulatory compliance at the other end of the spectrum. Irrespective of the actual reason - whether it is a moral compass for the business or it is avoid legal action against the company, the EH&S as function has gained great deal of prominence in the recent times.
The key to having a robust environmental compliance is in knowing the regulations and putting in proactive measures to address those.
Knowing the regulation is a dynamic activity. Change is inevitable -everywhere. Regulations are no exception. According to this article in the latest Supply Chain digest, on an average 17% of regulations change annually. Something like recent BP oil spill tragedy can result in drastic changes in the safety regulations in the industry. It is very important for the companies to analyze such changes and determine which are all applicable and which are all not. Complying with a dated regulation is as bad as not complying at all!
Compliance is everyone's business- It doesn't matter whether you are an automotive manufacturer or a manufacturer of aircraft engines or computers, regulators want you to account for the effect your products have on the environment, consumer health, and employee safety. This goes well beyond finished product quality testing against regulated specifications. Firms have to manage the levels of emissions and waste created during the full spectrum of operations throughout the entire lifecycle of their products and facilities, from R&D through transportation to customers--and increasingly to end of life and disposal. The broadening reach of environmental compliance is leading several organizations to assess and repair environmental risks throughout their supply networks, and they need smart software and service providers to do it.
In a soon-to-be-published point-of-view paper on Leveraging After-Sales Service for competitive advantage, co-authored by me, we have attempted to highlight the need for 'Proactive service management' and 'Analytics and knowledge management' to address, among other things, the environmental compliance. Essentially, the idea is to have a real-time or near real-time monitoring of performance of assets (read original equipment's) from the time they leave the manufacturer's premises. This will help the manufacturer identify potential health and safety issues and address them proactively. This can be achieved by a combination of asset visibility through the life cycle using GPRS enabled alert mechanism and developing an information system based on transactional data. The standard operating procedures of the equipment should be dynamically updated based on dynamically changing regulations. For this to happen, the enterprise asset management applications should have a real-time interface with tools like Applicability Review Tool mentioned in this SC digest article.
Keen to hear more ideas on how EHS can be achieved through IT enablement.
