Ever wonder what companies like Coca-Cola, SC Johnson, and Toyota have that keeps them at the top of their industries year after year? The Upside to An Integrated EHSQ Management System reveals a key aspect of leading companies’ business success: a commitment to integrating and managing Environmental, Health and Safety, and Quality issues.
Managing Quality in an Age of Tight Regulation
Many successful businesses view the various aspects of corporate management and product integrity as functioning parts of a single, holistic entity. They each tend to their corporate EHSQ ecosystem by tapping outside experts for assistance and certification, integrating it with leadership objectives and corporate goals, and harnessing the power of digital tools to support further success. This integrated approach can help address the increasing burden regulatory bodies place on corporations.
However, most businesses still have disparate internal management systems. The ISO’s Annex SL, a high-level framework that can address the standards of multiple systems, helps to streamline management. This framework should be paired with a modern approach to business that incorporates technology and collaboration.
Silos Go Against The Grain
In order to thrive in the modern marketplace, businesses must be agile and open to disruptive new technologies. They must also knock down the silos that are preventing the sharing of data between different departments. Silos create unprecedented risk for modern companies. Just like the body, when one part of a company is experiencing a problem, the whole entity suffers.
Siloed data can prevent management from understanding the true nature and impact of a problem until it reaches a critical state. Additionally, enterprises that engage with multi-discipline corporate endeavors can find that siloed data may prevent complete compliance for processes, end products, or services. The fallout from these issues is significant. Mitigation and remediation costs damage revenue and growth while compliance and regulatory problems can stalk even the strongest brand image.
Duplication and Missed Opportunity
Silos are not just the bogeyman of data blindness: they waste time and resources through duplication. EHSQ core processes are similar to those found in other areas of your business. These processes include fundamentals like document management, training, audit and asset management, and regulatory reporting. Companies that fail to utilize technology to integrate and streamline these processes are basically re-inventing the wheel, making it easy to fall behind more agile companies that are implementing a modern approach.
Perhaps the most insidious issue with silos is that they can stop your company from capitalizing on what it already owns: its data. By enabling data sharing, key problems can be addressed by many more employees, increasing the odds of finding an efficient solution. Best practices can be enacted across departments. Inefficient processes can be streamlined and better managed. Aggregating and analyzing data from throughout your organization can also lead to new opportunities for product creation or corporate growth.
Automate and Integrate for Success
EHSQ integrated solutions support your business’s success by creating a transparent view of corporate processes and issues. Of course, an IMS frees your departments to share data and collaborate on effective approaches to troubleshooting and efficiency. Departmental issues can be addressed before they impact the rest of the company and duplicate processes can be identified and rectified to eliminate waste. Since the company is using a single system to integrate and manage all the departments, IT issues and system training costs can be slashed. Creating transparency goes beyond simply cutting waste and increasing efficiency. It also means that company-wide data can be processed via analytics to identify new opportunities or potential growth areas.
