I'm building a health and safety management system for a global organisation where demonstrable H&S infrastructure and systems are very basic or not present at all. My experience is that the Corporate EHS Team creates the strategy and sets the standards and then local entities "translate" these into local ways of working thus meeting legal requirements and the spirit of the corporate strategy. This way, global KPI's can be set to enable benchmarking, there is consistency in approach and the management of risk.

My organisation has a Corporate EHS fucntion who have one high level policy which instructs each of their individual legal entities to introduce their own management system. There is no other EHS competency in these legal entities in each individual country. My concerns are that while each legal entity is an operating division in its own right, they operate under the Corporate banner and name. Therefore there will be inconsistencies in approach and potential discrepancies and even conflicts with many separate management systems that will only be capable of being auditted if the auditor has knowledge of every system. This for example could result in 20 different policies on new and expectant mothers which "may" meet legal compliannce but which will introduce 20 different ways of managing the subject.

Can I please have views on this approach and whether it would work successfully. Thank you

Marriott

Difficult to answer your question as we don't know what sort of organisation this is nor whether you are employed by the organisation or brought in to help as a consultant or as an interim appointment.

However, I think that the general principles set out by Steve should be valid.

There should come a point where the Corporate centre should make decisions as to whether local legislation and standards are sufficient to meet the Corporate ethos or whether you need to impose some minimum standards that might go well beyond local requirements.

Hi Nick yes we did along with worldwide behavioural safety program...whether it was good or bad we had SAP...not the best and very expensive..took us nearly 12 months to get that right before we got rid of the legacy systems....big slog and lots of patience needed...we jumped to web reporting and web auditing linked to the IMS as mere 6 months later...as the training system linked to it, TRACCESS helped as everyone had an email as a result (although only in the training system)....Enablon is another tool used extensivley by Pharma organisations...isn't bad but some don't use it to its full potential...not sure I managed to help you there but essentially we went for a web based system that linked directly to the standards, training materials and audit question sets...all of the documents were in English as the company language..with only local documents for checklist being in that country language...