Helpline Support Services
Where can you get quick answers to specific questions about regulations and programmes that impact your business activities, both at home and overseas?
As an EHS manager in an expanding international company, you know that laws and
regulations are constantly changing, and, even more to the point, your own
company and its markets are constantly changing, making it imperative that you
have access to quick answers to specific questions about laws, regulations,
threshold limit values, restricted materials and substances, minimum safety
standards, etc.
More often than not, you need the information yesterday, and
simply don’t have the time to scour files for approved consultants, put
out an RFP, wait for the responses and then select the bidder that has the best
price and whose approach comes closest to meeting their needs. To get a simple
answer to a simple question (and let’s be fair, sometimes more complex answers
to questions about very complicated policy or regulatory matters) takes an
inordinate amount of time and usually requires one to buy a lot of excess
baggage.
Tailor-made solutions
ENHESA understood a long time ago that what
our clients are looking for are consultants they can trust to move quickly and
efficiently to get concise answers to specific questions, or at least to advise
as quickly as possible on the real complexity of the situation the questions
deal with, propose efficient ways of getting the needed answers, and let them
decide whether and how to proceed.
What our clients don’t need is overkill and huge bills for research that goes
far beyond their needs or worse, that doesn’t even answer the question.
ENHESA can quickly mobilise and deploy the necessary resources to
respond rapidly to most questions concerning EHS policies and requirements.
The ENHESA Helpline
support was conceived to strengthen corporate EHS departments, allowing them
full access to the EHS regulatory resources at ENHESA.
At ENHESA, no question involving local or international EHS law, policy or regulation is too big or too small. ENHESA’s Helpline Support
Service was originally conceived to provide an additional level of support to clients
receiving our regular monitoring reports. But it soon became obvious that many
other clients sometimes just needed a quick answer to a specific question, so we
now offer all clients the same deal: for example, they give us a blanket
authorisation to expend per question up to a maximum of eight hours’
professional level of effort and reasonable expenses to quickly research and get
back to them with the answers they need. If a question turns out to be much more
complex than they or we anticipated, we are responsible for letting them know
that within the allotted timeframe and let them decide whether and how to
proceed.
Experience
ENHESA's Helpline responds to clients who come from a wide range of backgrounds and thus have a need for services tailored to their activities, markets, products and services. They include specialty chemical manufacturers, computer and IT manufacturers, telecommunications equipment manufacturers, automotive and aerospace companies, consumer electronics manufacturers, food and beverage producers, medical equipment manufacturers, toy manufacturers, and many others.
Sample questions
These are some of the questions that we have helped our clients with over the
Helpline:
Clarification of the definition of waste (and therefore the requirement
for a license to transport waste) for a glass manufacturer needing to
transport discarded glass back to the supplier for recycling;
Clarification of the documents and authorisations needed to ship
graphite electrodes from the US to Malaysia, China and India;
Snapshot review to identify current and pending restrictions on the use of
cadmium in manufacturing processes and products in the European Union and the
United States;
Clarified requirements for registration of client product with Dutch
environmental authorities and provision of data necessary for permitting
wastewater discharges, to facilitate negotiations for sale of product to Dutch
end-user;
Obtained and summarised in English latest workplace threshold limit values for
dangerous substances and occupational exposures in China;
Provided a snapshot review of environmental requirements impacting industrial
operations in Colombia;
Identified all substances and materials of concern that are banned or
restricted under EU legislation for electronic product manufacturer;
Identified and obtained copies of all requirements regulating hazardous
materials transport in six Asian countries;
Analyzed the requirements applicable to the shipment of discarded transformers
containing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from Mexico to the Netherlands for
recovery;
Outlined which chemical restrictions faced by a manufacturer of printed circuit
boards are regulatory and which are driven by major customer environmental
policies (and how to comply).
Cost-effective services
Our experience is that the vast majority of these kind of questions require no more than
2-4 hours' effort, and many such questions can be answered immediately, with no
real expenditure of professional effort. And if we can answer such questions
right over the phone or via a return email, and it costs us nothing, then we
don’t bill. Frequently, a client is looking for a copy of a law or regulation,
and we either have it in our extensive library, or we can get it with no real
effort. Again, as long as it doesn’t require more than a few minutes’ effort and
no cost, we don’t bill. On the other hand, we sometimes do field questions or
situations that we know up front are more complex than our clients realise.
In
such cases, we advise them of the complexity of the issue and the effort
required to get the answers they’re looking for and let them decide how they
want to proceed. Most often, we will propose a phased approach, understanding
that it might not require all steps to arrive at the needed solution.
In some cases, having expended most or all of the allocated time, we come back
to our clients with what we think are only partial answers and suggest ways to
proceed further, only to discover that we have in fact found already addressed
their concerns. In any case, we never bill our clients for more than eight hours
professional effort for any assignment without their agreement in advance to
commit more time and resources to the matter.
Using the Helpline
The Helpline is available to all ENHESA clients. If you are not a
client but would still like to make use of the Helpline please contact us at enhesa@enhesa.com
or at +32(0) 2 775 9797 (Brussels) or at +1 301 530 1392
(Washington).