By A/Professor Reginald Tan B. H. from the Department of Chemical & Environmental Engineering, NUS and Mr Huang Lei, a Research Engineer with CPEC

Introduction

In the chemical industry, safety, health and the environment (SHE) issues have attracted increasing attention both from the top management of the companies and from the governmental authorities.  In many companies, a single department is responsible for SHE, although the management systems for the three areas have been developed separately to meet certification requirements.  The trend of obtaining separate certification for various management systems may exacerbate the situation in terms of duplication of effort, documentation and ultimately cost.  By contrast, an integrated management system for SHE will be more cost-effective and achieve better performance by building on the many similarities that already exist.  After all, above management systems and the Responsible Care program, initiated by the Chemical Manufacturers Association, can be considered as aspects of the Total Quality Management (TQM) philosophy. In this brief article, some of the established SHE management systems will first be compared, to show the common components and the opportunities for integration.  Then the benefits of integration will be identified and analyzed.  Lastly, some discussion on the challenges and problems that might emerge during the integration process will be presented.

Common Elements in SHE Management Systems

Many companies have implemented management systems for safety, health and environment based on the principles of Evaluation, Planning, Doing, Checking and Amending to achieve continual improvement.  These basic principles provide the framework on which to hang the individual elements of the respective management systems (refer to Table 1).  One national standard, one international standard and one industrial recommended practice are chosen for the purpose of comparison.  API 750 --- Management of Process Hazards;  ISO14001 --- Environmental Management Systems; and OHSAS 18001 --- Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems.  You will know from the table that the total numbers of the elements in the three management system models are 11, 17 and 17 for API 750, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 respectively.  In addition, the titles of the elements can be different.  However, these elements can be grouped together into a common framework of seven main principles.  In this particular case the seven principles chosen are Policy & Strategic Objectives, Organization, Risk Assessment, Implementation, Monitoring, Auditing and Management Review.  This is illustrated in Table 1 below.  Other equally acceptable frameworks could be formulated. Table 1. Grouping of SHE management system elements

Challenges

Developing an integrated SHE management system in a company with no existing management systems is going to be difficult, as the company will have no basic framework in place.  The first task is to adopt a framework as outlined in Table 1, and first attempt to adopt those elements that are easily integrated, such as, policy & strategic objectives, training, communication, documentation, incident investigation, auditing and management review. Having an appropriate technique for gap analysis is also crucial to the success of the integration.  The analysis shall be systematical and thorough to ensure that there are neither overlapping functions nor missing elements.  Another challenge is getting your integrated management system certified against different standards.  If your integrated management system adopts a different approach or framework as comparing to the particular standards to be certified against, it is difficult for certifying bodies to identify and recognize the elements in your   management system that fulfill the requirements of the particular standards.  It is recommended to design the integrated management system according to the structure and format of ISO standards for ease of obtaining certifications.

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to express their sincere gratitude to Mr. John Lockwood for reviewing the article and his helpful comments and invaluable inputs.