Improving University’s EHS Systems

The mission of EHS for world class universities is to provide and support comprehensive environmental, health and safety programs and services in support of the university’s mission of teaching, research and service.  Developing an EHS culture helps attract top professors and administrators to the university.  Decide Consulting is now bringing their EHS software expertise to education institutions with its DecisionEHS practice. DecisionEHS is Decide Consulting’s EHS Process and Audit software review.  During the DecisionEHS process, we review: All EHS software data sources Reporting inputs and outputs Make detailed recommendations based upon our findings. All of this at optimal price point [...]

AGILE EHS – IS SAFETY ALREADY AGILE?

One of the things we have encountered delivering Environmental, Health & Safety (EHS) software solutions is how safety professionals have been working Agile for a very long time.  Things that are new to the software delivery sector have been in practice for decades in the safety world.  If you look at the four-point workplace program delivered by OSHA in 1989, there is a lot of common threads to what is Agile today. MANAGEMENT COMMITMENT AND EMPLOYEE INVOLVEMENT Agile is all about empowering team member to keep developers developing, testers testing and analysts writing requirements.  From an EHS standpoint it [...]

Apply Agile Methodology to Environment, Health & Safety (EHS) Projects

Navigating the rough waters of keeping a EHS job site safe is a complicated and difficult undertaking. Managing the communication across departments, risks, audits and action items can make staying organized difficult and slow down EHS initiatives.  And when an accident happens, the reactive nature of fixing the cause of the accident throws off all the proactive efforts that are done to prevent accidents in the first place. Interestingly, Agile methodology. long favored by the software development community, lends itself well to the EHS process. You don’t have to go into a safety project hoping and praying that accidents won’t [...]

EHS Software Problem #4 – That’s Not How We Do It Anymore!

In our work with companies implementing or changing their EHS Software, we often hear this quote or a variation of it: “We used to do that, but now all incidents are required to be reviewed by the plant manager before being closed out.” When we hear this, we very quickly hear some combination of the below: We have changed our investigation methodology We have changed our incident management process We have changed our action item process Our tracking system/software is inflexible and cannot be changed to match our evolving safety culture We have identified new processes that we want to [...]

EHS Software Problem #3 – There are Still Manual Processes

In our work with companies implementing or changing their EHS Software, we often hear this quote or a variation of it: “We have millions of dollars invested in EHS Software, but so much of our data about incidents is still in spreadsheets and email attachments” Here is the typical scenario: A company invests millions of dollars in an EHS software package. This includes license fees, training, setup, configuration and change management. A lot of time and effort were invested by employees and high priced consultants. Rollout and adoption were a bit rocky. Now you have had the system in place [...]