I attended an excellent session this afternoon at the 19th Annual NAEM Forum on management of change (MOC), during which speakers presented sound advice and insights regarding EHS/S MOC management issues. Some highlights are below.
There are various types of management of change. These commonly include changes in processes, regulations, personnel, locations (M&A), and priorities and attitudes. Read More
Recently, more companies have focused their attention on analytics and the role that they play in reinventing company management practices. Participants at MIT’s CIO Symposium on “Emerging Stronger from the Downturn” reported an increased use of data analysis and analytics applications to “understand customers, parse trends, distribute decision making, and manage risk.”
To help managers capitalize on the ways in which information and analytics are changing the competitive landscape, MIT Sloan School of Management and the IBM Institute for Business Value have initiated a research program entitled “The New Intelligent Enterprise,” which addresses the following: Read More
As a living system, a company’s risk profile is continually shifting. The growing attention on sustainability and corporate responsibility (CSR) has stretched companies as they wrestle with ways to characterize and manage their sustainability and CSR risks.
Integrated EHS, sustainability, and CSR management systems provide a robust structure to manage risks. A key concept in an integrated management system is “the management of change” (MOC), which focuses on identifying and managing risks as operations or the operating environment change. MOC procedures and process typically kick in when new equipment or manufacturing lines are installed, during mergers and acquisitions, or during internal re-organizations. On the corporate responsibility front, forward-thinking companies include the monitoring of third-party monitoring criteria in their MOC process.
Strong MOC processes are part of a company’s first line of defense for risk reduction. The MOC process should detect most risks that arise in between formal risk assessments. Read More
With the increasing need to address Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) issues, organizations are faced with several options on how to proceed in developing their internal capabilities. Beyond their sustainability and CSR strategy, there are nuts-and-bolts issues to consider, such as who will lead the effort and how to build the team or department.
A common starting place is to tap the EHS department and their personnel. The logic behind this is solid, given how central EHS is to sustainability and CSR. While the EHS function and its personnel are a good starting point, sustainability/CSR quickly encompasses areas in the organization well beyond EHS.
The C-Suite must consider how it is going to identify and develop its people who lead and manage sustainability/CSR. In the case of EHS professionals, those competencies and skills go beyond their solid technical foundation. Read More
The issues and challenges presented in Green to Gold and suggested in REACH and the nanotechnology areas raise several issues. The first relates to an organization’s Management of Change structures and functions, while the second relates to the EHS function’s capacity to manage and guide the organization in these areas.
The concept of Management of Change (MOC) is central in EHS management systems. The basic idea behind MOC is that policies and procedures are established to identify and respond to new issues that can change an organization’s EHS risk profile. Typically, changes in processes or production lines are currency of MOC activities. More forward-thinking organizations include organizational and regulatory change issues in their MOC activities. Read More