Author Archives: Rob Harrison

About Rob Harrison

Rob Harrison leads the Intelex EHSQ content team and guides the overall EHSQ content strategy for the EHSQ Alliance. His focus is providing Intelex's market leading platform and the EHSQ Alliance with relevant, trusted and actionable content. He has 17 years of experience in designing, building, implementing, supporting and marketing enterprise Environmental, Health & Safety, and Quality management system software.

Faster, Smarter, Accurate EHS Compliance Arrives with ehsAI and Intelex

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Let’s explore how a collection of smart tools, algorithms and the most advanced EHSQ platform in the world combine to solve important problems in an epically reduced timeframe

If you have attended or followed topics presented at analyst or industry forums, in or adjacent to, EHS over the last few years, you’ll know that both the analysts and vendor community have invested much time in framing how digital transformation drives the ‘4’ in 4.0. There’s a 4.0 for everything at the moment and Intelex is committed to strategies and is executing on actions that deliver results in an EHSQ 4.0 world.

We have seen presentation after webinar after presentation about the EHS trends we all should pay attention to. Of these trends, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) probably are the two most exciting and pervasive. They also are described as perhaps the most challenging, hence … Read more...

Drive Engagement in Quality and Safety Management with the Help of Technology

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“If only I could get my organization to a state where our quality culture is embedded as a norm in every leader, contributor and partner. This would alleviate our constant trouble-shooting and reactive-stance dilemma. We’ve invested, stopped to ‘sharpen the saw’ multiple times, and while we have seen initial improvements, it’s very challenging to sustain.”

“We’ve made all the right ‘traditional’ moves by putting in place a mentoring program, defining accountability, consulting stakeholders, holding events, providing support and putting training programs in place. It seems though, that we experience diminishing returns and even I can’t remember the last time I took notice of the multitude of posters (some of which I sourced) dotted around the workplace.”

Sound familiar? If you’ve said it, thought it or heard it, maybe it’s time to think differently about quality culture and, more specifically, engagement in the context of quality and/or safety management. Engagement is … Read more...

UK’s Health & Safety Executive Focuses on Engagement, Risk Management for 2018/19

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As 2018 enters the final straight and we gallop into 2019, it seems it is only natural that we take a few moments to consider plans and preparations for the coming year. Regulatory agencies like the UK’s Health & Safety Executive (HSE) are planning for the coming year as well.

In particular, some industries should pay close attention as the HSE lays out where some inspections will be targeted (see below and Pages 8 & 9 of the report).

HSE’s Business Case for 2018/19 

Planning is as important for the regulator as it is for our own organizations. A particularly good source for a birds’ eye view on the priorities the HSE in the UK has identified and prioritized is the regulator’s business case for 2018/19.

The business case outlines the action that will deliver on its unwavering mission statement:

“At the Health and Safety Executive, we believe everyone has … Read more...

True Engagement Starts with Speaking Digital Natives’ Language

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I attended a great conference in 2017 at the spiritual and literal home of England’s national rugby team, Twickenham. The event was the Verdantix EHS European Summit. I was lucky enough to be invited to participate on a panel that generated audience questions about the under-leveraging of Health, Safety and Environmental metrics and whether more data is desirable if organizations were already struggling to handle and gain meaningful insight from what they had. This was a solid topic and it played into one of the key conference themes of Big Data.

All was going to script, and then it happened… a senior director said the following, or something close to it:

“It’s all well and good this discussion of data, systems and associated metrics, but if we don’t find better and more innovative ways to engage our people in safety, nothing is going to change! Our performance depends upon it!”… Read more...

Neglect Corrective and Preventive Actions at Your Peril

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The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that “all systems tend towards disorder.”

It’s interesting to me to think about actions (corrective or preventive) in the context of a management system in terms of energy and potential chaos. The reasoning for this is that without energy introduced into the system, there is a predictable outcome, which is a net loss to the system and inevitable tendency to disorder, possibly chaos. This helps me frame why paying lip-service to a management system is potentially worse than not having a management system in place at all. For some businesses, not having a management system at all (certified or not) can or will kill their ability to win contracts, operate in some markets, and ultimately identify opportunity, never mind have continuous improvement within their grasp.

Companies with management systems and those that manage actions well have an advantage over those that do not. These … Read more...