Why Safety and Quality Leaders Must Collaborate and Work Towards a Set of Common Goals

A recent article in EHS Today discusses a few key points that emerge when analyzing several cases of how lack of a robust safety management workflow has caused major havoc in companies that were well-known for high-levels of quality. Often, there are safety hazards and incidents for the following reasons:

1. Safety management is isolated from other business functions and entrusted to a ‘specialist.’ It is impossible to deal with safety or quality in a silo. It should become part and parcel of how you do business. Safety and quality must fit seamlessly into the entire workflow and lifecycle of your enterprise’s business process. It is a layer that must exist across all stages, from suppliers to the end-consumer.
2. In some organizations, though safety measures may be implemented, lack of meaningful metrics or lack of an overarching safety strategy can cause it to fail.
3. Organizations also realize that safety management needs to be part of the corporate culture and not merely a set of rules to be followed. It is not about meeting regulations alone. It is about taking a proactive approach to assessing, analyzing, identifying, and acting in all areas related to risk and safety.
4. Training and orienting employees towards safety practices and continuously reskilling them is extremely important.

All four challenges mentioned above can be overcome by implementing a safety culture that is integrated tightly with your organization’s quality process.

A cloud-based solution like ComplianceQuest EQMS + EHS, built on the Salesforce.com platform, gives businesses insights into the root cause of deviations, helps institute corrective and preventive actions, conduct data-driven audits, manage a robust supplier management process and drives collaboration among diverse teams.

Many of these functions are common to safety, but many times, the debate disintegrates into which should come first – quality or safety. A siloed approach follows, or an attempt at integrating the two becomes difficult due to the mindset that one should take precedence over the other.

This siloed approach of separate quality and safety leads to:

1. Two disparate systems, not integrated in terms of data
2. Employees requiring training in multiple systems and entering data multiple times
3. Absence of an integrated system making collaboration among diverse teams more difficult
4. Lack of sync in the process of maintaining and upgrading the two systems
5. Difficulty in embracing data-driven decision-making and risk management

At ComplianceQuest, we believe quality, health, environment, and safety management must be unified into a single holistic, flexible and scalable platform.

Read this whitepaper to find out more:
https://www.compliancequest.com/whitepaper/harnessing-the-power-of-an-integrated-qhse/