EHS Flex in Action-- Four Case Studies, One Solution

Our global clients continue to face highly dynamic challenges across their organizations such as reduction of EHS budgets, the downsizing of EHS corporate and regional management, and the difficulty of understanding where resources are needed globally to maintain a sustainable and safe EHS culture. 

Antea Group had four global clients with seemingly disparate needs:

1. A Corporate EHS Director moving to a new company needed to gain a baseline understanding in support of building an EHS global program.
2. A Corporate Environmental Director needed to understand where best to allocate limited resources to support the EHS program globally. The company was also integrating new global acquisitions and the Director had little information regarding the EHS compliance maturity. 
3. A Corporate EHS Director who had a stable internal audit program with a three-year rotation of external audits was trying to determine a risk profile to justify a reduction in the external audit program in order to free up resources.
4. A Corporate EHS Director who was undertaking an insurance review of their global program who wanted to quickly see if there were any gaps in the health and safety training of their employees prior to the review.

Traditionally, companies have conducted self-audits and/or invested in full EHS compliance audits by third-party consultants. In our experience, self-audits can become an internal power struggle, resulting in suspect data and a poor indicator of the true status of the EHS compliance program. Objective EHS compliance audits are the gold standard, yet the expense can’t always be justified for annual data collection thus limiting the reach of audits across the organizational portfolio, and they take time to organize the visit and finalize the report.

Through the collaborative design with our client-partners, Antea Group developed EHS FleX, which is a flexible survey tool and process that can be scaled and tailored to your organization's needs. EHS FleX assisted all four of these clients with their challenges, providing EHS insights and a broad benchmarking, and enabling them to prioritize EHS business investments and understand their current global EHS risks.

1. For the new EHS Director, EHS FleX provided a way for her to engage with each site for a common goal. The analytical EHS global risk profile of her facilities as well as discussion of the current staff’s EHS knowledge and culture were invaluable as she began setting priorities. The gap analysis conducted during EHS FleX implementation was loaded into an EHS data management tool. The tool allowed her to trend her facilities by geographies, topics, and priority risk ranking in order to track EHS gaps through to corrective action closure. 
2. For the second client, similar results were obtained as Antea Group gathered permits, chemical and waste inventories, and identify those EHS managers that had best-in-class solutions within the company. From this data, the Corporate Environmental Director was able to justify budgets, identify tools to deploy globally, create, and track an environmental compliance calendar in addition to tracking permit expiration and gap corrective actions. Finally, the process helped her understand the maturity of the EHS program of the new acquisitions and create a roadmap to bring all facilities to corporate expectations.
3. For Antea’s third client, EHS FleX was deployed as an enhancement to their existing annual global audit program. For the external audit program, the analysis was used as a pre-visit data collection tool to assist auditors’ review of the facility's regulatory-based information. For the corporate team, they were able to see the risk rank score to rescale which facilities should have external audits more frequently. 
4. Finally, for our fourth client, Antea Group was able to complete the entire EHS FleX process virtually within two weeks of the request. Giving the client time to manage country-specific gaps to ensure a safe workforce and a better insurance review, reducing their overall costs.

In all cases the facilities received a value-add during the gap analysis portion of EHS FleX by having multiple conference calls with our in-country consultants, allowing them to grow their in-house knowledge of compliance requirements and strategy.

Antea Group helped create shared EHS awareness of tools between facilities, getting diverse locations on the same page.

All in one place, we were able to collect corporate permits and authorizations, waste and chemical inventories, and created environmental compliance calendars enabling clients to utilize web-based EHS data management tools with site-specific information from day one.

The overall risk inventory allowed the clients to advocate for changes in program structure, resourcing, and investment validation using concrete data and company-specific insights.