Growing a strong safety compliance program with Siemens USA

This success story was originally published by VelocityEHS.

Jean Edwards, EHS Professional with Siemens USA, graciously took the time to sit down with VelocityEHS and Enhesa during a joint webinar to explain how she and her team have built a successful compliance management program by capitalizing on the VelocityEHS and Enhesa integration. She is a super user of both systems and has been a part of the Siemens EHS team for more than seven years.

Velocity, a world-class EHS & ESG software provider, partners with Enhesa, the global leader in compliance intelligence, to integrate Enhesa’s expert global regulatory EHS Intelligence with Velocity’s Audit software, a part of its award-winning EHS capabilities. The integration makes it possible for customers to access custom-built, automated audit checklists from Enhesa, within Velocity’s Audit software capability to easily verify compliance with different regulations and standards unique to their organizations and their different locations across the globe.

Here are Jean’s expert insights and answers to questions she was asked.

What are some common challenges you and your team face with EHS compliance?

Jean Edwards: Here in the US, Siemens has over 40,000 employees, 25 manufacturing sites, along with many different warehouses and other branches and field sites. Each location is a little different, so there are numerous different processes and compliance challenges we face as a corporation and at each specific site. It is important for us to have standardization across the entire organization, using the same EHS tools and having the same EHS processes in place. This helps our EHS teams at the different sites focus on work being done at the sites, and they do not have to worry about implementing different tools or processes to meet compliance regulations, in addition to performing day-to-day tasks.

Plus, as a corporation, being able to know and see what needs to be done to meet compliance regulations at all sites gives us an overarching view of how we are doing as a business. With all the regulatory compliance changes and legal implications, it is important for us to stay on top of this information. Enhesa makes this easier and helps us stay in compliance, along with the Velocity centralized management system.

How are you able to keep up with changing regulations?

JE: We rely on Enhesa to keep us up to date on regulatory compliance changes in real time. Once a month, we are provided with a list of compliance updates from Enhesa, and we are able to cascade these to our different sites. Each site is required to report back to us, letting us know if the site is affected by any of these changes. These updates from Enhesa automatically go into the Velocity system, streamlining the regulatory process. So, when we do our audits, we are confident our protocols are current, even with all the changes that are going on.

How do you foster a compliance culture across diverse teams and different locations?

JE: It really requires a large effort from leadership, employees, and all stakeholders to have a good compliance culture. Leadership is so important because employees do as they see, so you really need to have the message coming from the top around EHS compliance. Continuously assessing and managing your risks, doing compliance monitoring, and completing regular audits (which is what we use VelocityEHS for) helps us to identify areas we can improve upon. Employee involvement is also very important. Having a rewards and recognition program for EHS compliance encourages employee involvement in all your EHS initiatives. Getting their feedback on tools and how tools are developed is so critical because, at the end of the day, they are the ones using them, and you need their buy-in for a compliance culture to be effective.

How do you get employees on-board using a single globalized platform versus a single localized tool?

JE: If you do not already have a tool in place, you first need to understand what all your different sites and locations are using and what their needs are. Next, you need to communicate the benefits of transitioning to a single, globalized solution, highlighting how it will streamline processes, reduce duplication, and enhance collaboration amongst teams and locations across the organization, and, of course, how it relates to the organizational strategy. It is important to have a super user who can address any concerns that come up; this helps employees know who to go to for help and gets them the training and support they need, to get the most out of the tool.

What are the advantages to a centralized EHS platform?

JE: The advantages of managing EHS from a centralized system are standardization and improving processes. From a corporate standpoint, it makes it easier for you to be able to see the broad picture of EHS compliance at all of your locations. You can see and understand your EHS risks and how they relate to your business. In addition, you have a complete overview of the total compliance status. This helps you to really pinpoint what programs and topics you can start focusing on next.

What are some best practices customers should consider adopting to get the most value out of both systems?

JE: With the information we receive from Enhesa we can set up different protocols for each site and location. Then, we use these protocols to meet our legal requirements, within our management system. This helps us know which requirements we need to comply with at the different sites. All our sites have slightly different types of operations and are in different locations, therefore regulations may vary. Each compliance checklist helps us to get site plans in place with the needed protocols for different states such as California, Texas, and South Carolina, where there are in-depth regulations associated in these states.

Once the protocols are in place, we can easily transfer them from Enhesa into VelocityEHS. This is where Velocity helps us in two different ways. One is site-based, where each site conducts assessments on different EHS topics throughout the months, and the other is at the corporate-level, where the corporate team goes on-site to do larger compliance assessments, so we know we are meeting compliant regulations.