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Mind the gap
02 Jun 2009
Topics: Environment, ISO 14001, Health & safety, OHSAS 18001, Entropy Software
For GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), one of the world's best-known pharmaceutical and healthcare companies, compliance issues add complexities that most industries never have to face. Having the right tools in place to collate and manage the data and to help keep things looking healthy is critical.
Compliance management is an essential ingredient for any business. It's fundamental to internal control processes and for assessing compliance with corporate performance standards. For GSK, a leading pharmaceutical and healthcare business, compliance has always been a core issue. It has had to be: whether coping with internal management processes, health and safety issues, external regulations, environmental reporting or industrial standards, the need for a stringent compliance management system was vital.
"Compliance issues are incredibly complex," says Damian Corlett, global Environmental, Health & Safety (EHS) systems implementation manager at GSK. "We have a comprehensive set of EHS standards that we audit against and each standard represents significant data to be compiled, collated and analysed."
However, it was one incident in particular that revealed a potential gap in GSK's EHS system, according to Corlett.
"There was a serious machinery safety incident a few years ago at a GSK site, and management wanted to share what we had learned across the group in order to stop that kind of incident happening again," he says.
"Typically, the corporation would issue an alert, recommending actions that should be implemented in order to prevent such an accident recurring. The difficulty was in trying to track the fulfilment of those recommendations - it's all very well to publish a document, but tracking recommendations to completion is a different matter.
"We didn't have enough oversight in place at the time," Corlett points out. "We decided to use the Entropy Software™ system for gap analysis. Individual sites fill in relevant sections of the Audit and Compliance Management module of the system, and everyone can see whether there are any gaps."
The Audit and Compliance Management module can help to ensure and demonstrate compliance with internal and external standards, legislation, procedures and codes of conduct. It also provides instant and real-time visibility of the compliance profile of parts or even the entire organization.
If any gaps do appear, Corlett explains that site managers are able to identify them immediately and create an action through the Entropy Software™ system to close that gap within a specific period of time. And this would all be visible to management at all levels using the Entropy dashboard and scorecards.
"You can see which sites have gaps and then monitor those gaps by running a report," says Cortlett. "In simple terms, it's a case of issuing an Alert when something has gone wrong, and then using gap analysis to track whether it has been closed or not, whereas before you couldn't.
"Every site has to report their EHS incidents in the Entropy Software™ system," he adds. "That feeds into our Corporate Responsibility report, as does all of our environmental data. It's integral. For example, the amount of CO2 the corporation produces is calculated from data in the Entropy Software™ system. And within the organization, the software allows us to drill down through the data and graphs to even find the name of the person who entered those numbers at each site."
Taking responsibility
The introduction of Entropy Software™ was part of a wider GSK global initiative to collect data for the Corporate Responsibility report. It has since been scaled up to include incident reports, audits and risk assessments, among other things.
"We've been using the system since 2001, so it was already familiar to the organization," says Corlett. The system covers over 200 sites worldwide, for managing GSK's health and safety compliance issues.
"One of the reasons why we use the Entropy Software™ system is that it allows resource efficient implementation," he points out. "With the appropriate level of management support and communication, an individual can do two days of work yet influence 200 sites. That's how easy it can be."
According to Corlett, it was relatively straightforward to get the entire organization onboard with Entropy Software™, due to the obvious business need: "Something serious had happened and people saw the need to do it. At the moment, the team is using the audit function of Entropy Software™ at a corporate level, but we want to bring all of our sites into the system," Corlett explains. "That's the next stage of my role: to try and get more of our sites to use our EHS management system, called EHS Manager - which is based on the Entropy Software™ system - as a standard way of working."
According to Corlett, GSK is also aiming to achieve global certification to ISO 14001 as well as BS OHSAS 18001 by 2010, and the Entropy Software™ system is integral to that implementation.
"A number of the sites have already used Entropy Software™ to achieve and maintain their certification," says Corlett. "The more we manage to standardize the work, the more sites are using Entropy Software™ to actually deliver certification."
CASE STUDY: Entropy Software™ - Audit and Compliance Management
Effective Audit and Compliance management, as offered by the Entropy Software™ system, enables the scheduling, planning and conducting of audits and assessments, the identification of non-conformances and triggering and tracking of recommendations for improvement.
This lets users track any problems and implement corrective and preventive actions (CAPA). The system allows companies to easily and instantly report audit and compliance information at site level, at business unit level, or across the entire business.
For more information: www.bsigroup.co.uk/entropy
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