The roadmap towards a holistic safety culture based on an integrated environmental health and safety solution landscape

Abstract

Environmental health and safety (EHS) is too often considered as a functional area or as a center of specific expertise and EHS managers are seeing themselves too often and too much as a capsulated competence center. Such an approach to EHS will always fall far short of what is really needed for a successful, holistic, proactive and preventive safety culture. EHS is in fact an environment or network of many stakeholders with very different rolls, objectives, expertise and backgrounds. And it is a cobweb of many processes and functions within and outside of EHS, which are all correlated with dependencies and interdependencies. Above all: EHS is not an island within a corporation, but part of the production chain and part of the operative process, from sustainable purchasing and supply change, to safe operations, sustainable product design and productions, and on to market access and transportation. And within the network of markets, customers, competitors, regulators, NGOs, and investors it is more and more a crucial and inevitable prerequisite to assure save and sustainable operations based on a sustainability strategy, and to measure sustainability performance and make the sustainability achievements visible. This can only be achieved in a holistic concept or strategy that considers the classical enterprise resource planning (ERP) in the same way as it considers the broad landscape of functions and processes within EHS, i.e. assuring safety and the protection of co-workers health, facilitate safe operation, minimize the environmental impact of the operation, and design and produce sustainable, marketable products, and by this way to drive brand safety and the triple bottom line of profit, social performance and environmental performance. © 2014 WIT Press.