Tackling silos in EHS compliance — Lessons from our clients
Overcoming organizational siloing is a vital step in achieving comprehensive EHS compliance, but how should businesses go about it?
There is a difference between working together and working in the same office.
Simon SinekOrganizational silos are a significant problem for global businesses looking to maintain EHS compliance. When companies operate multiple sites across different jurisdictions worldwide, each with its own regulatory requirements, processes, working culture, and even local language, it can be difficult for corporate leadership to be certain of the company’s compliance status everywhere it operates.
Silos can take many forms. Technological silos might result from using different software and technologies to track compliance across your sites or between the site and corporate levels. Data silos may occur when your data isn’t compatible or where it’s not shared across your business. Organizational silos may occur when your processes and teams aren’t fully aligned.
Silos can cause serious problems, including fragmented communication, inconsistent implementation of EHS policies, and a lack of shared best practices across sites. They can even lead to blind spots, increasing the risk of compliance breaches and ultimately damaging a business’s reputation and commercial success.
At Enhesa, we work with leading businesses worldwide to help them understand their EHS requirements and track their compliance status confidently — everywhere they operate. Our solutions are purpose-built to help you align every local site with your global compliance strategy, eliminating silos with a single, consistent source for EHS regulatory intelligence.
In this article, we’ll examine how three leading businesses have used Enhesa EHS Intelligence to achieve alignment across their businesses, discuss how they achieved success, and share lessons learned.
1. Go beyond the basics
‘Good enough’ is no longer good enough
EHS regulations often vary greatly between jurisdictions. Even when businesses invest heavily to meet local requirements, they may find themselves with a variety of processes and compliance standards to manage across all the jurisdictions in which they operate — resulting in silos.
Businesses are increasingly tackling silos by adopting a global set of corporate standards that exceed EHS regulatory requirements, and seeing the benefits of doing so:
- It allows for aligned ways of working across sites and lets teams know immediately what they need to do wherever they operate
- It demonstrates a commitment to safe, compliant business practices to buyers and investors alike
- It’s an opportunity to align EHS compliance, sustainability, and ESG programs, making more efficient use of resources while empowering teams to deliver stronger results for each
We talk more about how to align these programs in our recent executive eBook, The impact of EHS on corporate sustainability.
Enhesa’s solutions are designed to facilitate this. We offer EHS content in more than 400 jurisdictions, categorized under a unified system of headings and subheadings, making it easy to compare requirements globally. We also offer dedicated ESG and sustainability content through Enhesa Corporate Sustainability. That means teams can rely on one provider delivering familiar, standardized content across these functions.
How American Axle achieved aligned EHS and sustainability
American Axle is a global tier-one automotive supplier with 80 facilities in 18 countries and a commitment to achieving a consistently high level of compliance and sustainability best practices. It faces strict requirements from its buyers and new regulatory requirements with an increasingly global reach.
To meet this challenge, American Axle built a coordinated approach to compliance and sustainability, using Enhesa to identify global requirements that needed addressing. They built dedicated ‘green teams’ within the organization and ultimately aligned requirements at each site to a single high standard.
This helped them respond more effectively to new sustainability requirements. American Axle is set to meet EU Landfill directives eight years before the implementation date. It enabled them to meet and exceed requirements, reinforcing their reputation as a safe, reliable supplier. In fact, they reduced their already low incident rate from 3.0 to 0.5 in just 18 months.
2. Focus on achieving buy-in and cultural change
Compliance isn’t just a process problem
To tackle silos, it’s not enough just to implement new processes or tools. It’s essential to achieve buy-in across the teams using them. Stakeholders who are genuinely on board contribute their expertise, resources, and energy, which can drive the project forward more effectively. On the other hand, without buy-in, even the best processes risk being met with resistance or lackluster engagement, leading to delays, inefficiencies, or even failure. Training and upskilling staff are also key, ensuring they can effectively use the new systems and realize their full value. In our recent webinar, we talked to industry experts Anthony Wareham and Marieke Bleyenbergh about how businesses can build a safety culture.
At Enhesa, we understand this.
We’ve built our solutions to work seamlessly with many other leading EHS solutions, empowering teams to work in the platforms they already know. Additionally, we offer Expert Services to help you effectively deploy our solutions across your organization, reducing the time to value. This might include training, onboarding support, communications, and more.
How Siemens USA achieved buy-in for its compliance program
Siemens USA is the US subsidiary of Siemens, a major multinational technology conglomerate. Siemens USA alone has over 40,000 employees, 25 manufacturing sites, additional warehouses, branches, and field sites. This presented challenges, as each site had slightly different processes, working practices, and compliance requirements.
Siemens USA used Enhesa, alongside our partners VelocityEHS, to implement one set of tools across their sites and an aligned set of processes. They proactively communicated the benefits of the new globalized system internally and designated a super user to assist with training and support. Finally, they implemented a rewards and recognition program for EHS compliance and sought regular feedback from internal stakeholders, achieving a high level of buy-in. All this helped them build a culture of aligned, effective compliance.
3. Stay consistent — even while you’re growing
Achieving growth while maintaining consistency
One common challenge for global businesses is achieving growth while maintaining best practices across their operations. The need to get going quickly and the unique pressures faced by each new site can make it easy for silos to form.
Enhesa EHS Intelligence is well-positioned to support growing businesses. Our coverage of more than 400 jurisdictions means that we can cover most locations a business might expand to while still managing EHS requirements in one format, on one platform, with oversight for corporate teams. We also offer solutions that specifically support businesses entering new jurisdictions — like Regulatory Guides, which provide a primer on the regulatory landscape and key topics.
How Angelini Pharma built a strong foundation for growth
Angelini Pharma is an international pharmaceutical company headquartered in Italy. They discovered Enhesa while experiencing significant growth, with new sites in the US, UK, and other European countries. Angelini Pharma needed to manage this expansion while maintaining high standards across its business.
Ultimately, Enhesa was able to help Angelini Pharma maintain compliance for its subsidiaries and implement a system where they can check EHS compliance anywhere in the world with minimal hassle.
4. Get the right help
Adopting best practices, driving cultural change, and keeping an eye on consistency during times of growth are all key to eliminating silos across the EHS function. Ultimately, however, success will depend on each organization’s specific challenges, processes, and working culture.
One common theme is the need for a ‘single source of truth’ that provides reliable, high-quality EHS data worldwide and lets teams compare requirements across jurisdictions. This empowers teams to collaborate and gives corporate compliance professionals total visibility of the regulatory requirements impacting the business across the globe.
Enhesa has a track record of delivering exactly this intelligence for a wide variety of organizations, backed by a team of experts who can support our customers and share best practices. We’re proud to have been the foundation for so many success stories, and we’d love for you to join us. Learn more about how we can help by exploring the solutions we offer…
